


Look to My Little Babes

by songlin



Series: What Comes Undone [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Angst, Case Fic, F/M, Fluff, Genderbending, Genderswap, Kid Fic, Pregnancy, References to Suicide, Reichenbach Falls, Smut, Suicide, Tilly Briggs, girl!Jim, girl!sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-31
Updated: 2012-02-15
Packaged: 2017-10-28 14:01:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/308609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/songlin/pseuds/songlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nothing changed between John and Sherlock once they became a couple. The baby was a bit of a curveball though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dealing With Things Way Beyond My Maturity Level

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline notes now that S2 has aired: this story takes place post-Scandal and post-Hounds, but for this story's sequencing I've bumped everything around and assumed about a year between Hounds and the Fall.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock should have seen it coming, but then her own body was one of very few things about which she had always been astoundingly unobservant.

It started with her appetite.

Normally Sherlock would eat only when absolutely necessary or when John issued some sort of a threat. He considered it an accomplishment of the highest order if he got two full meals into her a day. But sometime in the middle of January she switched gears suddenly and couldn’t seem to _stop_ eating. When John came into the kitchen to find Sherlock munching out of a bag of crisps while scrolling through emails he was flabbergasted. He was hesitant to comment for fear that he might break the spell and send her back to her old ways, so he simply carried on as if nothing had happened and started actually shopping for two.  

The next sign should have been the sleep. 

Sherlock Holmes’s sleep patterns were nothing a normal, healthy human being should aspire to match. She had a habit of going without for days when she was on a case and then sleeping for sixteen-hour stretches when there was nothing on. The first time she actually went to sleep during a case John was actively alarmed. Sherlock woke up in the morning furious and grumbling about physical weaknesses and influenza, so John chalked it up to a bout of some kind of virus, even when Sherlock started not only sleeping for actual eight-hour stretches (though not always at night or during reasonable midnight-to-eight-A.M.-type hours) but _also_ taking occasional thirty-minute naps during the day. They weren’t always noticeable, because Sherlock tended to take said naps in untraditional positions, such as in the exact same ball of frustration in which she sulked or sitting at the table with one hand on her chin and the other on her laptop keyboard. When John worked up the nerve to ask, she said she was experimenting with the amount of sleep she got and whether or not it improved her output.  

“Oh? And how’s that going?” John asked, only slightly skeptical. 

“I haven’t enough data to come to a reliable conclusion,” she replied shortly. 

It was also no cause for worry when John arrived home from the clinic to find Sherlock seated in her chair across from Mycroft, legs crossed and face looking crosser. Impromptu visits from Mycroft were well within the norm. 

He gave John a thin smile once he had shut the door. “Ah, the happy husband returns,” he said smoothly. 

Sherlock made a short huffing sound like a peevish dragon. 

“Getting a bit ahead of ourselves there, Mycroft,” said John. 

He laughed, which _was_ cause for worry. “Yes, I suppose,” he said cryptically.  

Sherlock squinted at him. “Surely you have someplace you ought to be?” 

Mycroft checked his watch and grimaced. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Mustn’t stray too far. Especially not with that business over in Honduras on...though you certainly don’t need to hear about that.” 

Sherlock scowled and followed her brother with her eyes until the door shut behind him, at which point she sprang to her feet and grabbed her shoes. 

“I’m going out.” 

John blinked, bemused. “Out?” 

“Yes, out,” she said testily. “Is there a problem?” 

“Well, er, no, I was just...do you need me?” 

“No. Pass me my coat.”

He did so and she shrugged it on. “Care to tell--” 

“Not at the moment, no.” 

“Ah. Nice.” 

Sherlock buttoned up her coat, huffed impatiently, took John by the shoulders, and kissed him briefly on the lips. “John,” she said, holding him firmly by the jaw, “it is of the utmost importance that I not tell you the subject of this particular experiment until I am absolutely sure of the accuracy of my results. Do you understand? Nod if you do.” 

John sighed and nodded. 

Sherlock smiled. It was small and brief, but oddly calming. “I shan’t be gone long,” she said, and was out the door in nothing flat.

John retreated to the couch and switched on the telly for a few episodes of Blackadder. He fell asleep sometime around the beginning of the second series. 

By the time Sherlock reappeared the DVD had reached its end some hours ago and the television was now showing its screensaver. The slam of the door woke John instantly. 

He rubbed his forehead and checked at the time. His eyes widened. “Sherlock, where the hell--” 

He stopped. 

Sherlock had shed her coat onto the floor and tossed her scarf on top of it. She had untied her hair and was now running her fingers through it, scratching her scalp and pacing back and forth across the kitchen in strange patterns. Her brow was furrowed so deeply it wrinkled her entire face. 

It was more worked-up than John had seen her since the swimming pool and Moriarty.

“Alright,” he said, getting to his feet, “what’s wrong?” 

She shook her head violently, clapping both hands to her forehead. “I’ve been astoundingly unobservant,” she said fiercely. “Stupid! _Stupid_ of me not to notice!”  

John blinked the lingering drowsiness out of his eyes. “What? Sherlock--” 

She stopped abruptly and slammed her hands onto the kitchen table, knocking over an empty beaker. “I’m an _idiot_. I’m one of them. It’s the only explanation.” She pressed her hands over her eyes and heaved a heavy, shuddering sigh.  

_Oh God. Oh dear God please no,_ was all John could think.

Sherlock Holmes was not _crying_. She could not be _crying_. As an infant in the crib she’d probably eschewed tears in favor of forcing her caregivers to deduce her needs. Nevertheless, she gave another sigh, this time accompanied by a hitch in her breath that definitely meant tears.  

John crossed the room and hesitantly laid a hand on her shoulder, as if he were afraid of startling her. “Sherlock?” he said tentatively.

She rubbed her eyes furiously. When she let her hands fall to her sides (but one drifted down to John’s on her shoulder, to his everlasting shock), her eyes were red at the edges but her face was dry. “I’ve been at Bart’s,” she said evenly. 

John’s mind immediately began flicking through the worst explanations. Sherlock’s mother dead. Life-threatening tumors, blood clots, drug relapses... 

“I’ve done all the tests in triplicate. I’m positive.” She laughed humorlessly. “Extremely positive, in fact. Positive beyond a doubt.” 

 _Oh Christ, it’s HIV, and we’ve been having sex without a condom._ I’m _the stupid one._  

“Sherlock,” John said very quickly in a very low voice. “You need to tell me what’s happening.” 

Sherlock took a deep breath and turned round to face John, but did not meet his eyes. Instead she fixated somewhere around his chin area. “What’s happening,” she said, “is that my last menstrual period was eight weeks ago.” 

The room suddenly seemed very bright and full of much less air. John felt all the blood drain from his face. 

“Sherlock,” he said faintly, “could you, er, run that past me again?"

“Eight weeks.” There was a strange buzzing in his ears that he had come to associate with major trauma, like being shot. “And three different tests. Checked. Repeatedly.” 

“Thought that’s what you said.” 

He slid to the floor. 

Sherlock resumed her pacing. “And I haven’t the slightest idea of what to do. Do you know how often that happens to me, John? _Not_ _very_ , that’s for fucking sure.” 

 _This really is quite a bit like the pool,_ John thought from where he sat on the floor. 

“I will sue the _life_ out of the bloody manufacturers of these _useless_ _bloody things_.” She poked herself in the underside of the arm where her birth control implant was located. “I will even let Mycroft help. I will _destroy_ them.”  

John shook his head. 

“All of the signs were there, I was just _ignorant_. Inexcusable behavior. Tired, hungry, headaches, my breasts have grown half a cup size in two weeks...”  

John filed that fact away for future confirmation.

“...on top of which I didn’t even notice I was _late_ for _four bloody weeks_.” She whirled and frowned at John. “How long have you been there?”  

“Forty years.” 

Sherlock huffed impatiently. 

“Since you told me we were...” 

She laughed again. “Haven’t said it either. Ridiculous behavior. Eight letters, describing the physical state of gestating a fetus.” 

“And there we are. I’ve found another word I can’t bring myself to say.” 

She raised an eyebrow. “You’re a medical man. Aren’t you experienced in these matters?” 

“Not as they apply to me and my girlfriend!”

She threw up her arms. “Oh, _bloody_ _hell!_ I’m pregnant! Expecting! Gravid! Just chock-fucking-full of BABY!”

John stared at her for a moment. Sherlock stared back, her face sweaty and chest heaving. 

Then he laughed, loud and long. 

Sherlock spent a moment staring at him like he was mad before realizing she was laughing along.

She laughed until her knees gave out and she sank to the floor beside him, putting a hand on his shoulder to steady herself. He grabbed her hair and kissed the top of her head, still laughing all the while.

By the time they calmed, they were both lying flat on their backs under the table, hands clasped together. John turned his head. There were two spots of color in Sherlock’s cheeks, highlighting her fine, high cheekbones.

“What the hell,” he said. “We’ve got this.” 

She turned her head and cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “We have?” 

“Mm-hm. Know why?” 

“Aching to.” 

“Because I’m John Bloody Watson, and you’re Sherlock Fucking Holmes,” he said, punctuating his words with several pokes to her ribs. She chuckled and dodged the last one.

“So that’s the extent of this conversation.” 

“Yep. I’d figured you’d mostly made your mind up anyway, you were just looking for a bit of confirmation.” 

There was a moment of silence. 

“I love you,” Sherlock said. She sounded surprised. 

John smiled. “Yep. You do.”

“Oh?”

“Alright, you old nag, I love you too.”

They held hands there for some time, not moving, lying in the moonlight as Sherlock’s other hand rested just this short of carelessly on her belly. It would have been entirely indifferent had she not started to stroke it back and forth, as if feeling for information she did not have yet but knew was forthcoming.


	2. Aggressive Negotiations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things haven't changed, exactly. Not yet. It's just a bit of a kink in the finely-tuned machinery of their relationship.

They spent the rest of the night in John’s bed with Sherlock curled around John and all four limbs wrapped around him. In the morning he found himself still entangled and spent a fair five minutes attempting to extract himself from the nest of Sherlock without waking her. Naturally, he failed.

“Cup of tea, will you?” she mumbled into her pillow. “And something with eggs. I’ll be down in five minutes.”

Half an hour later, John was fully dressed and flipping an omelette. Sherlock had not yet deigned to put on clothes.

John grinned at her as she wrapped his bedsheet around her shoulders in a sort of lazy toga. She tied her well-tousled hair up in a messy ponytail and eyed his grin. “Awfully bright for this hour of the morning.”

“Sherlock, it’s quarter to eleven.”

“Irrelevant.”

He rolled his eyes, still smiling broadly. “Just excited, I suppose.”

Sherlock considered the statement for a moment, rolling it about her head like a cigarette between her fingers, before her face split into a broad smile. “It is, isn’t it?”

“It’s what?”

“ _Exciting_.” She said the word like it was some kind of magic spell.

John turned his attentions to the omelette he was sliding onto a plate. “Who are we telling now then? I mean, obviously there’s...doctor’s appointments and such, but we should tell a few people before we’re...you know...sure.”

“ _Not_ my mother. Jesus Christ, she’d set up camp in Mrs. Hudson’s downstairs. We’d have her practically living out of our foyer for the next seven months and she is _not_ something I am prepared to put up with for that long a stretch of time.”

He handed her the omelette, which she immediately began the process of devouring. “Not Harry. Same reason. Mrs. Hudson?”

Sherlock pondered. “Not yet.”

John nodded. “Yeah.”

Their eyes met as they came to the same realization at the same moment and groaned.

“I’m not calling him,” John said hastily.

“Well neither am I.”

“Wait,” John said, taking a seat beside Sherlock with his own omelette. “He was here yesterday.”

She swallowed a forkful of omelette. “Yes.”

“And it was right after he left that you ran off and did the tests.”

“Yes. Your powers of observation are truly astounding.”

“Mycroft’s not...he doesn’t...exactly how carefully _does_ he watch you?”

Sherlock ground her teeth and picked up the mug of now lukewarm tea that John had left out for her roughly a quarter of an hour ago. “He merely wanted to advise me that now that I am sexually active again, it might behoove me to practice multiple forms of birth control.”

John tried very hard not to think about how much Mycroft knew about his sister’s sex life. “Ha. I’m sure that conversation went well.”

“Oh, _swimmingly_. Naturally, that was when I came to the realization.” She looked murderous. Apparently that particular failure to observe was still a sore spot.

John had a sudden thought and chuckled. Sherlock shot him a scalding look.

“Sorry. It’s just...Mycroft. And sex talks. I’ve got this picture of him sitting you down at the age of seven and explaining to you all the facts of life.”

“Actually, I was ten,” she said in a pained voice.

John lost himself. “Oh God,” he said, between laughs, “I would have _paid_ to see that conversation.”

Sherlock glared and stabbed a tomato with slightly more vitriol that was strictly necessary. “I’ll text him after lunch.”

John sobered immediately. “For one thing, Sherlock, this _is_ basically lunch. For another, this is not the sort of news you deliver via text.”

“So you’ll call him then.”

“Oh no I won’t. He’s your brother.”

Sherlock surveyed him carefully. “You’ll handle Lestrade and his lot? I am _not_ going to put up with the round of reactions you’re bound to get out of Donovan and Anderson.”

_Oh, hell._ “That’s...fine. Oh..God, yes, I’ll handle that. But only if you’ll phone Mycroft when you’re finished. _Phone_ him. Not text, _phone_.”

Sherlock glowered into her mug.

“And then I’m calling a friend of mine for a referral and setting up an appointment.”

“I don’t see why you--”

“No. That is not happening.”

Sherlock was looking mutinous. John sighed heavily and made the decision to launch a preemptive strike.

“Sherlock, it’s not avoiding your work, it’s not a sign of weakness and in the long run it will actually benefit you to darken the door of a doctor’s office once in a blue moon, especially when you’re _pregnant_.”

Her lip curled. “In the time it takes to--”

“I’m not going to play this--”

“--have spent years building up an excellent immune--”

“--and we can discuss this sometime when we’re _not_ \--”

“--and I know my own--”

There was a knock on the door.

They both fell silent, mutually glaring daggers at each other.

“You going to get that?” John said coolly.

Sherlock cocked an eyebrow.

John closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead, and opened them.

“Coming,” he called.

It was Lestrade. “Morning.”

“Morning,” John started to reply, but was interrupted by Sherlock mid-word.

“If we could all agree to dispense with the formalities I’d like to hear what is so urgent that Lestrade couldn’t wait for his wife to finish her shower.”

John grimaced. “Showing off, Sherlock.”

“Yes.”

“Cheerful this morning, isn’t she?” Lestrade said in an undertone.

“Positively sparkling.”

“If you two are done talking about me behind my back--”

“We’ve got a bit of a case,” said Lestrade.

Sherlock snorted. “A bit?”

“There’s this cruise ship, the Tilly Briggs.”

“Oh, heard of that,” said John. “Very posh, very elite. Big with the Mycroft sort of crowd.”

Sherlock sneered.

“The problem is that crowd’s a bit thin these days,” Lestrade said, “and yet they’re still in business. We’ve suspected they’re a front for something for some time, but we haven’t had anything until last night.”

“What happened last night?” John asked.

“We got a tip.”

“Oh, wonderful! So the warrant’s in the workings, I imagine, and I’ll be right here... _still bored_. If that’s all, Lestrade--”

“It’s not,” he said testily.

She arched an eyebrow.

“We can’t read it.”

Sherlock cocked her head and smirked almost imperceptibly.

“It mentions the cruise, so the higher-ups are on us. Like I said, nothing real to go off of, but they’re positive something’s going on and they’ll be breathing down our necks til we find out what. And when all else fails...” He shrugged.

“Oh?” She stood. The corner of her sheet-toga slipped. She caught it, tucked it under her armpit and swept off down the stairs. “We’ll be at the Yard in half an hour.”

Lestrade turned to John and rolled his eyes. John shrugged.

“Half an hour?”

“See you then.” Lestrade clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t envy you having her 24/7, mate.”

“Ha,” John said feebly.

Twenty-eight minutes later, Sherlock (dressed) was frowning at a computer screen in Lestrade’s office. The email consisted of a blurry photograph of what was clearly the Tilly Briggs and six bunches of four letters each.

“SCTA-ACTA-CAEL-CIRS-UORI-LHOR,” John read out. “Well, at least they were--”

Sherlock clapped her hands together. “Simple rail fence cipher written along three lines, grouped in fours for ease of reading. ‘Stracciatella chiaroscuro.’”

“...clear,” John finished.

“Oh, well that’s helpful,” Lestrade said acidly. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Sherlock said, drumming her fingers against the desk, “but whatever it means, the sender of this email wasn’t afraid of it being read.”

“What makes you say that?” said Lestrade.

“Not _read,_ exactly.” Sherlock gestured agitatedly at the computer. “Well, look at that! Any amateur cryptographer could read that in nothing flat, but a computer program--now, that’ll run into difficulty. Ergo, we can assume the sender of this message was hiding its contents not from human eyes but from a monitoring program. Have you gotten far with the email address?”

“Not at all, it--”

“--was deleted immediately after the message was sent and it’s taking you a while to track the computer from which it came. So quite paranoid. Afraid, terribly afraid. So at tremendous risk, they send a message to the police, and all they say is _this?_ ” She shook her head. “They want to be found.”

“It’s a kind of soup,” John said loudly. “Stracciatella. Italian egg drop soup.”

Sherlock processed for half a second. “Oh,” she breathed, and jumped out of her chair. “Oh, _yes_. John, stay here until they find whoever sent the email. I’ve got errands to run.” She grinned and positively flew out the door, nearly knocking over a uniform in the process.

The officer knocked on Lestrade’s open door. “Sir? We found her.” She held out a thin manila folder.

Lestrade took it with a terse smile and flipped it open, skimming the contents. “Sent from an address out in Bankside. Resident’s one Laura Morstan.”

“Right,” said John, trying to look apologetic. “I’ll, er, head out there then?”

Lestrade sighed, then shrugged and handed over the folder. “Might not be quite so pleased to see a detective at her door as you anyway, and I’ve got to stay here and keep on looking into the list of passengers. Call if you find anything out, will you?”

“Will do, thanks,” said John, and he followed Sherlock’s path down the hall and to the elevator, texting her as he went. _Found the sender. Laura Morstan. Going now to talk to her._

His phoned binged less than a minute later. _I see. Text me with any news._

The cab ride to Bankside was long enough to give John time to read through the file himself. Laura Morstan, 30 years old, history teacher, daughter of Dr. Roberta Morstan (professor at St. George’s) and Admiral Thomas Morstan (deceased). One sister, Mary Morstan, 27, still living with their mother in a pricey penthouse downtown. 

John scanned through the bank statements, mentally sorting out the intake and outflow of funds. There were the monthly paychecks to Dr. Morstan from the university, mortgage payments, rent, Laura’s teacher’s salary, very large, irregular deposits and withdrawals by Dr. Morstan ( _Gambling,_ John thought), electricity, cable, groceries, clothes...and every Friday, a sizable cash deposit.

_Paychecks?_ he thought. _But who pays their employees in cash?_

He scanned further back through the papers and noticed that before three months ago, there had been two identical deposits every Friday for over a year.

He took out his phone. _Emailer/family receiving weekly large cash deposits. Ideas?_

_Several. Did they shrink recently?_

_Yes. How’d you know?_

_Tell you later. Busy._

The cab pulled up in front of a slightly rundown apartment building. John paid the driver, ducked out and inspected the door to the building. It looked like there had once been a number pad on which you could punch in a code that would unlock the door, but it had obviously been broken for a long time. He gave the door an experimental push and it opened straight away.

The hallway inside was poorly-lit and the floor was in dire need of cleaning. John looked around for the elevator for a moment before realizing his only option was the suspicious-looking concrete stairwell to his right. He checked the apartment number in the paperwork. 701. With a sigh, he resigned himself to his fate.

Six flights later, internally bemoaning his lack of fitness, he stopped in front of apartment 701, raised his hand and knocked.

“Just a second,” a woman’s voice called from inside. A moment later the door opened a crack, stopping short at the end of a chain. Through the crack John could see a strand of blonde hair, a stripe of a pale face and one blue eye. “Hello?”

John put on his winningest smile. “Hi. Er, Laura Morstan, right?”

Suspicion swept over her face like a storm cloud. “How do you know my name?”

“We got your email, and--”

She shut the door.

“Wait!”

“No.”

“I’m not with the police. I’m a...private detective. Look, if I can just have five minutes.”

A pause.

“Five minutes?”

“Not a second more.”

There was another pause, then John heard the chain being drawn back, the deadbolt unlocked and the door opened all the way.

The apartment was cramped but tidy, filled with the kind of furnishings scrounged up from secondhand shops and rescued from bins. There was a small kitchenette, a cramped living room containing an old television, a ragged sofa, a dusty armchair, end table and a bookshelf, and two doors off to the side John assumed were the bedroom and bathroom. It was not altogether a terrible place to come home to, but it had a slight air of misery about it, as if someone worked very hard to make it seem homey and come up short.

“Take a seat,” Laura said, gesturing towards the armchair.

John did so, taking a closer look at his host as he did. His mouth dried out almost instantly.

Laura Morstan was blonde, with long, pale hair and impressive curves. Burlesque-show impressive, to be honest. She was wearing ragged jeans and a baggy men’s shirt, but there are some figures upon which even unflattering clothes flatter.

John coughed. “So.”

“Look,” Laura said, taking a seat across from him on the sofa, “I can’t tell you much. I don’t know how much they monitor me. This is risky enough. You read my email?”

“Yes, but--”

She gave a terse nod and held up a finger. “This will go much more quickly if you just let me talk. Not to be rude. If you follow the advice I sent you, ask for Mary. Got it? _Ask for Mary_.”

“Mary. Right.”

She took a napkin and pen from the end table and scribbled something on it. “This is my mobile number. Call it when you’re done. _Not before_.”

Laura extended it towards him. John took it from her fingers and tucked it into his coat pocket.

“That’s all I can do for you,” she said, rising. “Can you see yourself out?”

“Er, yes,” John said, no less perplexed.

He pulled out his phone as soon as the door shut behind him. _Talked to Laura. All she’d say was ‘follow my advice and ask for Mary.’ Weird stuff._

By the time he was to the street, Sherlock had replied.

_Back to the flat. We’re going on a cruise._


	3. Close Encounters of the (Unfortunately) Typical Kind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John should have known better than to try to plan ahead. When the news came out, it came out, and he wasn't even too surprised that its telling was prompted by explosions and dead people and such.

“Sherlock,” he called as he made his way up the stairs into the flat. “The police are right. There’s something seriously weird going on. When I talked-- _what_.”

“I’m not used to these sorts of things; couldn’t remember how much was too much,” Sherlock said, inspecting her reflection in the mirror.

“You keep that on hand? Just...sitting in your closet?”

She snorted. “Hardly. Girl at the shop said it was suitable. Dresses not really my area.”

John could imagine that any shopgirl would trade a kidney to dress Sherlock. Just shy of six foot, thin as a rail and endowed with long, dark, curly hair and sinfully well-crafted cheekbones, she’d be a couture designer’s wet dream if she ever cared about clothes.

The dress was midnight blue and pleated, draping from one shoulder to where a belt cinched it close to her waist before flowing down to the floor. The fabric was thin enough for the skirt to lie close to Sherlock’s body, but when she moved toward the fireplace to pluck a tube of lipstick off the mantelpiece it was plain that there was plenty of movement to the dress.

John shut his mouth.

Sherlock frowned at the lipstick like as if it was refusing to give up the identity of Jack the Ripper. “You’ve got a tuxedo on your bed.”

“I’ve already got a tuxedo.”

“You’ve got the same tuxedo you wore to your sister’s wedding. Your tuxedo’s on your bed.”

John sighed, but went to put on the tuxedo. When he came back downstairs, Sherlock had temporarily abandoned the lipstick in favor of putting on an ornate necklace, matching earrings and two rings. She had also painted on cat’s-eyes in dark silver shadow and black liner and was cautiously brushing mascara onto her long, dark lashes.

John made some sort of noise that largely defied definition.

Sherlock’s eyes flickered towards him and back again. “Really, John?”

He cleared his throat. “Right. How are we getting to the ship?”

“Mycroft’s car. I’ve talked him into letting us borrow it.”

John raised his eyebrows. “Oh, so you talked to Mycroft.”

“Mm.”

“How’d that go?”

Sherlock began applying the mascara to her other eye. “Didn’t think it was the proper time, John.”

He pondered for a moment, then winced. “I’ll give you that. But don’t think that doesn’t mean you’re not calling him the moment this case is over.”

She screwed the mascara back into its tube. “It’s almost over already.”

He rolled his eyes. “You can tell me in the car. With the rate your mouth moves you’ll never be able to tell me and put on lipstick at the same time.”

Sherlock sighed, uncapped the lipstick, ran a careful line around the outside of her lips, filled in the middle, rubbed her lips together and blotted them against the bathrobe hanging off a hook on the back of the door. When she was satisfied, she pointed to her mouth and raised her eyebrows at John.

John waved his hand. “Go on, I know it’s killing you.”

“‘Stracciatella chiaroscuro.’ Pretentious sort of name for a dish, like a high-end restaurant might do.”

“Something on their menu.” John shrugged. “So?”

She smirked. “It’s not on their menu. No ‘stracciatella’ of any kind, in fact. We can assume from that that it is a code phrase of some kind. That it is a type of food indicates that most likely one orders the dish at dinner and thus signal to the waiter that you are in the know.”

“Of what, exactly?” said John, hands on his hips.

Her eyes flashed. “Come, now, John, you’re better than that. You went to the woman’s house.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“Pretty?”

“I...er...”

“Come now, John.”

“Fabulously.”

“ _Fabulously_ pretty girl, once-wealthy family, widowed mother with a gambling problem, regular large payments, _has a younger sister,_ the payments dropped by I’m guessing half recently...”

“ _Oh,_ ” John breathed.

“The penny drops,” said Sherlock, pleased. She lifted the hem of her skirt and slipped her feet into a pair of sky-high black pumps with red soles. A car honked outside. “Must be the car. Come on, John.”

She pulled a white fur wrap around her shoulders, snatched up a black leather clutch and downed the stairs at an impressive speed, especially considering the height of her heels. John followed at a more modest pace, locking the door behind him. Sherlock was standing by the car, leaning her hand on her hip and looking John over like she was sizing him up for sale. As he reached around her for the door, she caught his wrist and pulled him flush against her body.

In her shoes, Sherlock was at least nine inches taller than John. He craned his neck up, but her head was dropped back, lids half-lowered and dark red lips parted just slightly.

“Sherlock?” John said patiently.

“Mm,” she rumbled, deeply and richly. “You’re mine. Know that.”

John swallowed.

_“Mine.”_  


“Any precipitating factors behind this particular declaration?”

Sherlock tipped her head forward, touching her forehead to his, and growled low in her throat.

John took a deep breath and shuddered. “I think you should know, were you not wearing lipstick I would kiss you til you couldn’t breathe and have you right here in the car.”

“It’s Mycroft’s car.” Her fingers tightened around his wrist.

“All the more hilarious.”

Someone inside the car rapped on the window.

John froze.

The window rolled down.

“Afternoon,” Mycroft said drolly.

Sherlock rolled her eyes. “I don’t recall inviting you, Mycroft.” She reluctantly let go of John, opened the door and slid into the car. John followed.

“Just stopping by to say hello?” Sherlock said icily. “Twice in two days. I’ll have to tell Mummy you care after all.” The car peeled away from the curb and into traffic.

He gave her a thin smile. “Oh. Will you be phoning her anytime soon?”

The car suddenly seemed terrible quiet. Sherlock was staring straight ahead and twisting her hair up into some sort of claw clip.

“I’m not sure.”

She shot John a warning look out of the corner of her eye. It did not entirely evade Mycroft’s sharp scrutiny, which he shifted to John.

“Let it go, Mycroft,” he warned. “Not the time or place.”

Sherlock tucked a curl behind her ear.

“Actually...”

John rubbed his hand over his face. “Oh, hell.”

“Perhaps it is!” She rubbed her hands together. “Mycroft, wonderful news. John and I are expecting.”

Mycroft’s expression will never be replicated nor described. His facial muscles constricted, rapidly fluctuating through most of the faces in the shock/horror/disgust family before settling on mild distaste.

“Congratulations.” He sneered.

Sherlock smirked, crossed her legs and smoothed her dress over her stomach. “To tell the truth, I was a bit nervous about this dress. I’m afraid I’ve got a bit of a bump.”

John was actually so confused he almost said something, but rethought it quickly. It was more than his life was worth to come between Mycroft and Sherlock.

Through his absolute bewilderment, he eyed Sherlock’s stomach and ballparked a gain of five pounds. Tops.

Mycroft looked pointedly out the window. “Yes. So. This cruise of yours.”

“Yes, we’ve got it well in hand.” She frowned down at her chest. “Are my breasts enlarging already?”

“Oh, for God’s sake!”

Sherlock grinned.

John knew better than to ask before they were out of the car.

The remainder of the ride passed in quiet, or what passed for it. Between the Holmes siblings, a lack of words was at least as communicative as if they were in a shouting match. Sherlock was sitting between John and her brother, legs still crossed and fingers curled around her clutch. She reminded John of a cat grooming its paws after depositing a dead mouse in its owner’s shoes. Mycroft, on the other hand, looked like the man who’d slipped on his favorite slippers to find a rodent corpse squishing between his toes.

Not for the first time, John suspected that he and the Holmes family spoke completely different languages. Or perhaps it was some kind of cultural divide, or secret code, or just something gone profoundly wrong in their childhoods.

They pulled up at the pier and Sherlock and John climbed out of the car. Mycroft shot his sister one final scowl before the door shut.

“Sherlock.”

She grinned.

“Um, _what?”_

“Come on, John. We don’t want to miss our ship.” She looped her arm through his and led him towards the dock.

John knew a cover when he saw one. He also knew that he had about ten seconds before Sherlock considered herself officially “on the case” and any further conversation about anything else would not happen. “No, really. What the hell was that?”

“Mycroft hates children,” she said, smiling broadly and tilting her chin up. “Positively _despises_ them.”

“Er, alright.”

“For the longest time, Mummy was on us about grandchildren.” She said it like a four-letter word. “She only just gave up hope on Mycroft.”

“And you?”

“Oh, years ago.”

John laughed. “Oh, I see. So now she’ll be on him again, won’t she? Wow. That’s...surprisingly normal.”

Sherlock giggled. John was mildly disturbed. “Oh, yes. Not to mention the babysitting possibilities.”

“Sherlock, our child is not to be used as a weapon in your stupid feud withOW.”

She had pinched his arm. “Oh, darling, the things you say,” she purred.

They had reached the gangway that led to the ship. A valet in a fine tuxedo was standing directly in front of it with an iPad in hand.

“Names?” he said cordially.

Sherlock looked down at him. It was not difficult from the height she was at. “John and Louisa Escott.”

John held his breath as the valet scrolled through his list.

“Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Escott. Welcome aboard the Tilly Briggs.”

Sherlock smiled. “Thank you, dear.” She swept up the gangplank, tugging John along with her.

“So, while you’re swanning about, talking like Sally Bowles,” John whispered, “mind telling me what we’re doing?”

_“We_ are getting into wherever they keep the girls.”

“And what are _you_ doing?”

Sherlock hummed noncommittally.

A host was waiting for them on the deck. “Good evening. You may proceed upstairs to the bar. We will be departing shortly.”

Sherlock dipped her head graciously. “Thank you.”

The first thing John noticed was that Lestrade was right. There was definitely a shortage of legitimate wealth. There couldn’t have been more than twenty people on a deck that was made for at least eighty comfortably.

“Where to?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment,” Sherlock said in an undertone, “when--ah.” Her eyes narrowed. Caught. She was back in character in an instant. “Come on, darling, I want to meet the captain!”

He was by the bar, carrying on a conversation with a sharp-looking blonde woman in a black dress with sheer sleeves. Sherlock smoothly navigated towards them, arm still in John’s, and stopped just close enough to hear their conversation.

“Timothy, don’t be absurd,” she was saying in what was otherwise a perfectly normal tone. “You have to--”

“Good evening,” Sherlock chirped, positively beaming. “My husband and I’ve just arrived and we did so want to meet the captain before we left and he had to be sailing the boat!” She let out a bubbly laugh at herself. The woman joined in quickly, whereas the captain managed only a thin smile. “Louisa Escott,” she said, holding out a hand. “This is my husband John.”

John smiled. “Nice to meet you,” he said with a small nod.

“Philomena Dent,” the woman said as she shook Sherlock’s hand. “This is Captain Timothy Cavanagh.”

Sherlock smiled coyly at him. “So pleased to meet you,” she said in a low voice.

_Oh. So_ that’s _the angle she’s playing._

John was a jealous man. He did not like that angle (well, parts of him did a bit; that whole sort of claim-staking instinct, you know). But he knew his job in these situations.

“I’ll just get us some drinks, shall I sweetheart?” he said, the very image of the oblivious cuckold.

She did not take her eyes off of Cavanagh. A sharp surge of jealousy pulsed through John’s midsection. “Yes, please,” she purred.

Maintaining a straight face and a smile was not as easy as John made it look. He took a seat at the bar, ordered them both tonics with lime and watched Sherlock at work.

Ms. Dent had disappeared. Sherlock had sidled up very close to Cavanagh. Her body was angled towards him, her posture imitated his and she held her hands near her throat and touched his arm occasionally when she spoke. It was textbook. What was odd, though, was that Cavanagh did not seem to be responding at all. He seemed distracted, frequently touching his pocket and looking away.

After five minutes or so, he ducked his head and excused himself. Sherlock laughed and made her way to join John at the bar.

“Well?” he said.

She gave him an enigmatic smirk. John rolled his eyes.

Sherlock took one of the tonic waters, sipped it, and made a face. “I’d kill for a vodka sour.”

“Ha! No.”

She scowled.

A bell chimed over the speakers, and the captain’s voice came through. “Ladies and gentlemen, if you will please make your way to the dining hall. We are now departing.”

Another valet appeared to usher everyone downstairs. Sherlock maneuvered herself and John into the center of the crowd and took his arm again, whispering into his ear as if they were sharing something deeply private--which, in a way, they were.

“Well, this is getting a bit fun.”

“Oh no. Oh, no no no. Sherlock, for you ‘fun’ usually means ‘blown up.’”

She grinned. John groaned.

“Oh, God...”

“The captain. He’s in and wants out.”

“How do you know?”

“He fought with Ms. Dent. Nail polish under his earlobe and hers is smudged. Must have hit him not long after painting them. Clothes not nearly as expensive as a man in his situation could afford. Could be because he’s not getting a big enough cut, but unlikely. He’s got regrets, thinks the money’s too dirty for him. Been drinking, hasn’t been sleeping, suffering from SSRI withdrawal...”

“How the...”

“Trembling, sweaty, old but very deep self-injury scars on the inside of his wrist. And his libido’s shot.”

They arrived in the dining room and took their place in the queue to be seated. John grimaced at the memory of exactly how Sherlock tested a man’s libido.

“Maybe you just hadn’t turned it on enough.”

She snorted. “Unlikely.”

“Oh?”

“I did the thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing with my voice. You know.”

“Ohh...yes. That thing. Ha. Yes, you’re right, there’s definitely something seriously wrong with him.”

Sherlock looked pleased. For a woman who cared very little about her appearance, she was incorrigibly vain.

“So why’re you so excited?”

The host took that opportunity to lead them to their table. Sherlock took this as an opportunity to not answer John when he asked her a question. Immediately after they were seated, a waiter appeared to take their drink orders. Sherlock ordered a gin and tonic. John ordered a cola and switched their drinks. Sherlock looked sulky but did not switch them back.

“So, the woman,” said John over his conquered G&T. “Ms. Dent.”

“Ah. Now you’re asking the right questions.”

“She’s a bit obvious.”

“Mm. Yes. Smudges of three different shades of makeup on her shoes. She’s either been in a theater dressing room recently or a whorehouse. Considering that the joint of her thumb reeks of a very particular cheap lubricant and her current proximity to an actual brothel, the latter’s more likely, I’d say.”

“Maybe it’s hers.”

“Unlikely. Pupils normally sized, pulse not elevated, skin a normal tone; she hasn’t had sex recently enough. And on the joint of her thumb? She picked up someone else’s.”

Their waiter arrived in time to block John from asking another question. “May I take your order?”

Sherlock smiled. It was a good smile, though it could’ve used matching horns and a pitchfork. “Why yes, you may. We’ve heard _marvelous_ things about your _stracciatella_ _chiaroscuro_.”

The waiter’s lips pursed. “Ma’am, that’s not on the menu.”

Sherlock met his eyes. “I know.”

He gave a small bow. “Very well. Follow me.”

\---

The waiter led them through a door marked “Employees Only,” past a pair of tall men in dark suits, down two flights of stairs and a long corridor that ended in a door that would have been nondescript if it had not been painted dark blue. So far, every other door in the ship had been painted the same off-white as the walls. John glanced at Sherlock and saw that behind her Posh Lady facade she was sharp and alert.

The waiter unlocked the door and it swung open. Inside was another long corridor, but this one was painted a dark, sinful red. More doors lined its length and just in front of the door was a wooden table upon which sat a heavy binder, a cell phone, and a ladies’ purse. Behind it sat Philomena Dent, filing her nails.

When she heard the door, she stood and smiled. “Knew you for clients,” she said, winking at Sherlock.

“Do I not seem the pleasure cruise type?” Sherlock said coyly.

Ms. Dent laughed. “Those ridiculous nouveau riche types look at the price tag on their clothes first and the item itself second. You’re wearing last season’s Tadashi Shoji, vintage Louboutins, and costly but tasteful Tiffany’s earrings. The upstairs crowd prefers their spoils gaudy, pricey and this season.” She gestured to the binder. “Please, take a look at our girls.”

John felt mildly sick. He gave Ms. Dent a thin smile and let Sherlock take the next move.

She did not disappoint. She leaned down and flipped the binder open, turning a few pages and humming appreciatively.

“Rates vary between the girls. Let me know if you see anyone you fancy, now.”

“Oh, definitely,” Sherlock purred.

_And there was The Thing._ “Darling, remember the one your friend mentioned? What was her name?”

“Ah!” She straightened. “Oh, dear me, I simply can’t remember.”

John snapped his fingers. “Mary! That was it. Mary. He couldn’t stop talking about her.”

Ms. Dent’s lips curved upward. “Ah, Mary. Very popular. You’re lucky you got here so early. Follow me.”

They stepped around the desk and followed Ms. Dent to the third door in the hall. She knocked twice.

“Visitors for you, Mary,” she said in a new, throaty voice.

The door creaked open. John had a brief moment of deja vu. The girl on the other side was like Laura writ young, down to the burlesque-show curves. Her hair was in some kind of complicated updo and she had done her makeup well, if thickly: red lipstick, dark blue eyeshadow and smoky black eyeliner. She was also wearing a short silk nightdress and nothing else. She would have been earth-shatteringly sexy if not for the thinly veiled terror in her eyes.

“Good evening,” she said in the tone of forced calm that John associated with parents whose children had gone missing. “Come in.”

Sherlock grinned. “Don’t mind if I do. John?”

She winked sideways and twitched her eyes towards first Ms. Dent and then the purse sitting on the desk.

“With pleasure.”

What followed looks like quite a bit of action on the page, but in reality it happened almost too quickly for the eye to follow.

Sherlock whipped her revolver out of the top of her dress, pressed it to Ms. Dent’s head and dragged her into the room. John lunged towards the table, snatched the purse up, followed Sherlock in and slammed the door behind him.

“The panic button!” Mary cried.

“Her shoes, John!” Sherlock shouted.

She shoved Ms. Dent face-first into the bed on the far wall and straddled her waist to pin her down, holding the gun against the back of her skull. John tugged the brown pumps off her feet, noting the small computer chip inside the left one.

“How’d you know?” she said through gritted teeth.

“Size too big,” Sherlock breathed. “You activated it already, but it doesn’t matter. Your partner in crime will be dead in fifteen minutes.”

She laughed. “Partner? Please. As if two people alone could run this.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll deal with you later. You.”

“Me?” said Mary.

“Obviously. You need to get everyone out of here. Take this gun. You’ll find Ms. Dent more cooperative when it’s involved. Get _everyone_ out. Even the passengers upstairs.”

“Sherlock, she’s--”

“No,” she said suddenly, “I’m fine.”

Sherlock eased off of Ms. Dent, keeping the gun trained. Mary stepped forward and took it from her hands. It took a moment, but the trembling in her hands subsided, and she grinned.

“This is going to be fun,” she breathed.

Sherlock smirked approvingly. “Good girl. Come, John. We’ve got to take care of something.”

She swept out of the room. John followed. They were on a floor below and half the ship away when the fire alarm went off.

“Very goodgirl! She’s doing well. Yes, very well indeed.”

“Sherlock, what are we doing?”

She huffed, stopped for a moment, peeled off her shoes and thrust them into John’s hands. “Trying to talk a desperate man down from blowing up this ship with us on it.”

“What?” And there was no reason for you to mention this before?”

“You’re much more exciting when you’re surprised.”

“I hate you sometimes. What happened?”

“Yes, but then later you don’t. Captain Cavanagh. He’s despondent and mad, not thinking. He’s got a box of matches in his pocket and doesn’t smoke, he smells of petrol, and when we were talking he was seriously limiting his use of the future tense. Combined with everything else we know and we’ve got rather an urgent problem.”

They stopped in front of a door marked “Engine Room.” It was already cracked. Sherlock bumped it open with her hip.

Inside, Captain Timothy Cavanagh had just tossed aside an empty can of petrol and was pressing a match to the side of its box. Sherlock threw out a hand.

“Don’t!” she shouted.

He paused momentarily and looked at her. Her arm lowered, fell to her side.

“Please,” she said, uncharacteristically gently. “At least tell me who your information came from. I know you found the girls somehow. _Please tell me.”_

He shook his head. There were dried tear tracks down his face, but he was calm now. “What’s the point? Either way there’s nothing. Nothing. Either the women stay here forever and I live with that, or you win and I go to jail for a very long time. What’s the point?”

The match was still pressed to the side of the box.

“You don’t have to live with it,” Sherlock said quickly. “But then, you’ve made your choice, haven’t you?”

He smiled bitterly. “Right you are. Swallowed everything I could find on this bloody ship already. The fire’s just insurance.”

Sherlock ran her fingers through her hair in a small, very Sherlock gesture of frustration. _“Please,_ Captain. Just a name. Any name.”

Cavanagh sighed and closed his eyes. “Moriarty. That was her name. Now, if you don’t mind.”

He struck the match.

The fire caught quickly. The air rushed out of the room and into the flames. Sherlock threw herself into John.

“We can’t do anything for him, run! RUN, John!”

They ran. Behind them, they could hear Cavanagh screaming, the sound getting higher and higher until at last it died out altogether.

They raced up the stairs and through the corridors, the fire alarm clanging in their ears. The upper decks were empty of passengers, the food on the tables still mostly untouched.

John and Sherlock reached the upper deck. She scanned the area and cursed.

“Can’t get to a lifeboat quickly enough. Come on, John!” She seized his wrist.

“Oh, hell,” he said, and they jumped.

It was a short fall, but the water was _freezing._ Sherlock and John resurfaced gasping. Someone on the nearby rescue boat screamed.

“Fuck it’s cold!”

“Astounding deduction! Swim!”

They had just clambered aboard the rescue boat when the Tilly Briggs blew up. Lestrade, having forced his way through the baffled cruise patrons and terrified sex workers, was opening his mouth to shout at them when it exploded. Most of the rescued passengers were just knocked slightly off-balance or off their feet, but Lestrade, John and Sherlock, being the only ones so close to the blast, were thrown off their feet and rammed into a bulkhead.

“Shit,” Lestrade groaned, dragging himself to his feet. “What the hell happened, Sherlock?”

“Later,” she panted, still crumpled against the bulkhead and stuttering from the cold. “We need to g-get to the hospital.”

“The hospital?” Lestrade said incredulously.

Realization dawned, followed closely by panic. “Oh, G-God. Yes, hospital, and quickly.” He pulled himself into a sitting position, stripped off his soaking tuxedo jacket and covered Sherlock with it. She pulled it tightly around her shoulders. They were both shivering violently, bodies cramping into fetal position in an attempt to conserve all the warmth they could generate.

“P-probably fine,” Sherlock said, sounding as far from it as she ever got, “b-b-but we should g-go just in c-case.”

Lestrade’s eyebrows had crawled up to the vicinity of his hairline. “Is there something here I’m not getting?”

“Always,” Sherlock squeezed out through chattering teeth. “Ambulance if at all p-possible.”

Lestrade frowned, but picked up his radio.

\---

The ambulance was theoretically possible. In actuality, it was much harder to flag one down when there were roughly fifty other people being attended to at once. John and Sherlock, still soaking and freezing, were sat down on a stretcher with blankets and promised they would be seen to right away. Ten minutes later, Sherlock was shifting from alarm to rage.

“F-f-fucking EMTs,” John growled, rubbing his hands together.

Sherlock was shaking from some combination of fury, cold and panic. “Where the HELL--”

“I’m g-getting Lestrade,” John declared, standing up and immediately sitting back down. “Mmm d-d-doesn’t appear standing’s happening.”

Sherlock reached down the front of her dress and drew out her phone. It was neatly sealed inside a plastic baggie.

“You knew we’d b-be in the water?”

“Sensible p-p-precaution.” She took the phone out of the baggie and punched in a number, cursing when her shivering fingers missed. She put the phone to her ear. “M-Mycroft. Went for a swim. Ambulance is a b-bit slow.”

The paramedics were rather more enthusiastic after Sherlock’s call. In less than five minutes, they were on their way to the hospital, sirens wailing, as they were stripped out of their wet clothes and wrapped up in hospital gowns and more warm blankets. Upon arrival, the doctors attempted to put them in separate rooms, which was thwarted when a half-unconscious Sherlock nearly jumped out of her wheelchair. It was less of a jump and more of a fall, but after that they knew to keep them together. 

“Eight weeks, no prenatal care as of yet as we only found out yesterday, ex-smoker, formerly a casual cocaine user, gets plenty of exercise, godawful diet, nothing else you need to know,” John rattled off in one breath. Not only had he gotten out of the wheelchair and was now _standing_ and rubbing his chest for warmth, but he could handle plosive consonants again. Everything was so exciting.

Sherlock had not gotten up, but rather curled her long legs up into the wheelchair and wrapped her entire body up inside the large blanket she had been given. She was still shivering fiercely.

The doctor raised his eyebrows. “Er, thank you, Dr. Watson. Both of you have temperatures above 32 and rising and your injuries are entirely superficial, so you probably won’t even need to stay the night. The fetus is likely fine since there’s no bleeding, but we’ll need to take Ms. Holmes off for an ultrasound to be sure.” The nurse nodded and took hold of Sherlock’s wheelchair.

Sherlock’s hand darted out from under her blanket and clutched at John’s hand. “Come with me,” she demanded. “Please.”

They passed Lestrade in the hall, who hopped to his feet and followed when he saw them. “Is she okay?” he said to John in a hushed voice, jerking his head towards Sherlock.

“She’s got ears,” said Sherlock.

“So we’re talking now?” John said.

“Yes. My vocalizers were rendered functionally useless while my body recovered, but they’re better now.”

“Right. It wasn’t that you don’t want to talk to doctors.”

“Why should I? I’ve got you.”

She smiled at him with a rare honesty that warmed John more than anything the paramedics had done. He laughed and rubbed at his forehead. “Of course. A night of panic and explosions? That’s basically a...candlelight dinner or something to you.”

Sherlock grinned. “Dessert to come.”

“If I’m not interrupting your date night with my case,” Lestrade said, “I’d like to ask a few questions about what exactly happened.”

An arm emerged briefly from the blanket to gesture blindly behind her. “John, you said you’d take them.”

It took John a moment to puzzle out what she meant. “Christ, Sherlock, now?”

“I did Mycroft.”

John sighed.

“He’ll let us be for the rest of the night if you do.”

“I’m going to do what, exactly?”

“After the ultrasound,” John said, “we’re going to catch a cab back to Baker Street, where we are going to sleep until roughly Tuesday. After that, you can wait for us to call you, or you can try to take Philomena Dent to trial by yourself.”

“And she’s not going to talk to you,” Sherlock chimed in as the nurse with the wheelchair rounded a corner.

Lestrade scowled. “Wait, ultrasound?”

“Observant as always, Inspector.”

“What do you need an--oh. Er. _No_. No?”

“Yes,” John confirmed as the lab technician opened the door to the radiology room.

“Break it to Donovan and Anderson, would you?” Sherlock called back.

The door shut in Lestrade’s face, which was gaping like a fish.

Sherlock and John steadily avoided each others’ eyes due to a very real chance of breaking out into laughter, which even Sherlock was not quite feeling up to yet.

She slapped impatiently at the nurse who moved to help her up onto the table, but allowed John to assist, though she probably didn’t need it.

Sherlock went down with surprisingly little fuss. There was no argument over the rucking up of the hospital gown or the unsatisfactory temperature of the gel, and John could practically see her biting back comments on the ultrasound technician’s qualifications as he moved the probe around her stomach.

“Just a second,” the technician said, “and--ah!” He paused. “There we are.”

In the center of the shifting grey mass on the screen there was a small black pit. Inside of that floated a tiny pulsing white shape. At first it was barely distinguishable, but then the technician moved the probe and its outline grew clearer.

John gasped. _“God.”_

“Everything looks just fine,” the technician said, smiling. John couldn’t imagine ever working in a job so long that what was happening on the screen failed to amaze him. “Placenta’s there, and those are the walls of the uterus. That pulsing is the heartbeat.”

John blinked very rapidly. All of a sudden he didn’t feel cold at all. Something hot and cozy was spreading through his midsection, making him want to do nothing more than curl up with Sherlock and laugh for days.

She laughed delightedly, and John realized she hadn’t taken her eyes off the screen. “Incredible,” she marveled. “I know intellectually their heart starts beating at eight weeks, but the significance of the information increases exponentially upon visual verification. Fascinating.”

John sniffed and wiped his face. “Me too, Sherlock.”

She turned her head and beamed at him. “We’re pregnant, John.”

He beamed back. “Yeah. We are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this chapter got a little bit away from me. Like, longer-than-both-the-previous-chapters-put-together away from me. Oops.
> 
> For your enjoyment and my serious problem with overdoing it on reference pictures, have these.  
> [Sherlock's dress](http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=48916352)  
> [Sherlock's shoes](http://ak1.polyvoreimg.com/cgi/img-thing/size/l/tid/77837146.jpg)  
> [Dent's dress](http://www.polyvore.com/cgi/img-thing?.out=jpg&size=l&tid=47909560)


	4. Never Less

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Including "How to Thoroughly Please Your Consulting Detective."

Sherlock and John did not, in fact, sleep until Tuesday. They got in at about three, punchy and not at all tired. Giggling, Sherlock taped one of the sonogram printouts to Mrs. Hudson’s door, drew an arrow to the tiny outline and wrote “BABY.” After a moment’s consideration, she added in parentheses “Mine and John’s.”

“I thought we weren’t telling her yet?”

“Lestrade and Mycroft know. Might as well. And I want to.”

“Terrible motivation.”

“Stop talking, stop _talking,_ I want to climb under every blanket we own and you’re joining me.”

They pulled the sheets and comforter off of John’s bed and dragged them to Sherlock’s. There was also a pile of blankets in the hall closet that Sherlock lobbed onto her bed. They had had to leave the hospital in their still-damp formalwear (“we’ll never get a taxi in hospital gowns”) which they shed as soon as the bed looked warm enough and dove under the covers naked.

“You’re so warm,” Sherlock said after she had wound her long limbs around John’s body and wedged her face against his neck. “How are you this warm?”

“Internal backup generator. If you’d an ounce of spare body fat on you maybe you wouldn’t be constantly freezing.”

“‘Mnot. You’ve seen me in summer.”

“God...yeah, I have. We’ve got to get AC in here before it heats up outside.” John shuddered. Sherlock’s arms tightened around his chest.

“Stop moving.”

“That’s breathing.”

“Stop.”

“I’m a bit fond of breathing in general, thanks.”

Sherlock muttered something about the bearer of his offspring.

“Oh Christ, I knew it was a bad idea to tell you I care about your fool of a self.”

Sherlock bit him halfheartedly. “Shut up. ‘Mgoing to sleep.”

John kissed the top of her head. “Night.”

“Mm.”

They were tragically woken merely six hours later when Mrs. Hudson discovered the sonogram on her door.

“Oh my _GOODNESS!”_

John jerked upright, which in turn jostled Sherlock into something vaguely resembling consciousness.

“Nooo,” she grumbled into the pillow, groping blindly for John’s arm. “Get back here.”

“She’s going to want to talk to us, Sherlock.”

“Don’t care. Warm here.”

“I should at least say good morning.” John began extricating himself from the blankets.

“Not a chance.” Sherlock finally found his arm. Her fingers clamped down. “In approximately fifty-seven seconds I’m going to want to use you.”

“Oh?”

“Well, bits.”

“Hmm,” John hummed noncommittally. “And that’ll change if I get out of bed?”

She huffed. “If you get out of bed you’ll say good morning to Mrs. Hudson. She’ll want to make breakfast. You’ll eat the breakfast. By the time she’s gone it’ll be ten at least and it won’t be the way you start the day anymore. Just...sex.”

“And there’s something wrong with ‘just sex?’”

“When I want the first thing you do today to be me, yes, there is.”

And that settled it, really. Well and truly settled it.

John crawled back in under the covers. Sherlock made a satisfied little sound, pulled him against her and kissed him slowly and deeply.

“Come on, love,” she murmured in her low, lovely contralto. “Make me yours. _Prove_ I’m yours.” She rolled John on top of her and between her legs.

He gritted his teeth. “Told you to be careful with that voice.”

“I only deploy it when strictly necessary.” Sherlock drew up her knees and placed his hands on her waist. “Now come on.”

Sherlock’s eyes were heavy and dark, her pupils blown wide from sleep and lust. Her hair fanned out behind her head like the halo around the Virgin Marys in medieval paintings. He would have told her so, but he simply didn’t think he could string together that many words with _Sherlock_ squeezing her legs around him, _Sherlock_ whimpering like a needy kitten, _Sherlock_ squirming against him.

“You’re beautiful,” he breathed. It was all he could manage.

On many days, she would have smirked and agreed, but on this sleepy, peaceful morning all she could muster up was a little sigh of pleasure. John slid his hands from her waist up to her breasts, circling her nipples with his thumbs. Sherlock arched her back and moaned.

“They’ve gotten bigger,” she panted. “Surprised you haven’t noticed. Not going dull on me, are you?”

John took them fully in hand, fondling them and feeling them out. Sherlock cursed softly. “I...ha. Noticing it now. Definitely.”

Sherlock looked down at him through heavy eyelids, amused. “Some fluctuation is typical, but really, I’ve gone up almost a cup size. And my nipples are hypersensitive.”

John groaned.

“Even my clothes are too much for me sometimes. Just the touch of the fabric...” Sherlock brushed the back of her hand down John’s arm. “...just this...I can barely stand it.”

John groaned and buried his face in Sherlock’s chest, latching onto the side of one pale breast with lips and teeth and tongue. She panted and writhed, threading her fingers through John’s hair and holding him close with urgent force.

“Yes. Oh, God, yes. John. _John._ I want you, John. Please. _Please.”_

John was certain Sherlock’s breasts could not have actually grown big enough to suffocate him, but he was having an awful lot of trouble getting enough air all of a sudden. Sherlock tightened her fingers around his head.

“Now, John! God, I _said_ please.”

“Then say it again,” he growled.

Sherlock’s voice went up at least a fourth when she whined, _“Please,_ John, _please,_ I want you to make me _howl.”_

“God,” John gasped. “You’re going to be the death of me.”

Normally, Sherlock would have a clever comeback like “only the little sort.” But she was not nearly back in her right mind yet, so she merely reached down and gave John two hard strokes.

_“You,_ John. I want _you.”_ She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and ground up against him.

“Yes,” he breathed, and pushed home.

Sherlock gave a short cry of relief. _“Move,_ John. Don’t you disobey me now, don’t you _dare.”_

John couldn’t have if he tried. He braced himself against the headboard and rolled his hips as slowly as he could bear, relishing every hitch in Sherlock’s breath and the long expanse of porcelain-white flesh spread out beneath his hands.

As John’s fingers tangled in Sherlock’s hair, he thought about the look on her face when she had a gun trained on Philomena Dent (or Jayme Moriarty, or anyone else). He remembered the smell of gasoline in the air and Sherlock’s voice quick and low as she was talking down a desperate man, the unabashed rapture in her eyes when she saw the outline of what would come to be their baby, the words “I’ve just got one,” the music Sherlock played when she was in a really fantastic mood, Sherlock curled up in her chair with a book, the sun shining on her alabaster skin, absolutely everything Sherlock that John could bring into focus.

For a brief moment, he imagined what it was like to be inside her mind, knowing and indexing everything to have and to hold and peruse at her leisure. Could she do that with him? Did she have in that mad old head of hers a carefully labeled file titled “John Watson,” full of the texture of John’s jumpers and the way he tasted at the nape of his neck? It was staggering, daring to hope that Sherlock Holmes considered him worthy of remembering, that in her mind, John Watson took precedence over the very stars in the sky.

And so it was with this thought that he shuddered and came with her name on his lips like a prayer, because if John Watson had a god it would be this beautiful, fascinating, alien creature in his arms who for some incomprehensible reason thought he was one of the most important things in the universe.

Afterward, she curled up against his chest, squeezed him tightly against her and kissed the top of his head. “Mine,” she said fiercely.

John chuckled. “I am, aren’t I? Yours. Totally and completely yours. God, I’m mental.”

“Incurably. Sally Donovan was right.”

“God forbid.”

Sherlock laughed. The sound sent warm shivers through John’s toes.

“Sherlock.”

“John.”

“Do you...think I’m more important than the sun?”

She snorted. “Stupid question. Naturally.”

John was positive he would never feel cold again. “Are you...really?”

“Don’t be daft. You’re _John._ You matter.”

He kissed her. She made a little amused smirk against his lips.

There was a knock at the door. “You two up?”

John groaned. “Come on.”

\---

As it turned out, Mrs. Hudson had had children herself. Her only son was now estranged and living somewhere in America, but nonetheless she, like all women who have ever given birth at any point in their lives, considered herself practically a licensed expert on pregnancy.

“When are you due?” she asked, pouring everyone a cup of tea and beaming like the sun.

Sherlock shrugged noncommittally. John grimaced as he did the math in his head.

“Er...April something. Middle of April.”

They were treated to a long speech about getting vitamins that Sherlock bore with impressive patience, or at least until her phone rang and she and John were obliged to go down to New Scotland Yard to handle the Tilly Briggs case.

Anderson and Donovan, when they saw them for the first time since the announcement a week later, were not suffered with quite as much restraint. Immediately after John and Sherlock ducked under the police tape, they started in.

“What does she get cravings for?” Donovan called. “The blood of virgins?”

Sherlock was kneeling by the corpse of a young man in diving equipment who had been found in a rubbish skip, seemingly oblivious to the comments from the peanut gallery. Lestrade grimaced. John shot Donovan a nasty look in the hopes she would take the hint. She rolled her eyes, but didn’t say anything more.

Anderson was less sharp.

“Aren’t there be laws keeping people like that from reproducing?” he wondered (loudly). “You know, limit the number of nutjobs.”

Neither Sherlock nor Lestrade gave a sign that they had heard a word. John took a long, deep breath.

“If nothing else, I’m positive Social Services is going to be involved inside of a week.”

Sherlock took Lestrade’s shoulder and pointed to something. While he was bent over, she caught John’s eye and gave him a curt nod. He laughed and shook out his hands.

“Right then.”

John turned, took five long strides back towards the police line and socked Anderson squarely in the face.

Lestrade was quite the gentleman about it. It wasn’t as if he could really charge John, seeing as how he was with Lestrade’s pet detective and neither of them were strictly supposed to be there in the first place. Instead, after forcibly separating him from Anderson, he gave him a hard shove in the chest and told him to wait by the police car. Anderson stomped off in a sulk to find a tissue for his bleeding nose. Sherlock did not budge from her inspection of the corpse the whole time. John would’ve thought she hadn’t even noticed if it not for the exceptionally broad grin spread across her face.

On the taxi ride back to Baker Street, she did such a number on John’s neck that he was sure he would have to borrow her scarves for weeks.

“I could kiss you,” she said into his Adam’s apple.

“You have. Repeatedly.”

“Then I’m doing it again,” she declared, and did.

_All in all,_ John mused, _barring the explosions, and the midwinter dip in the Thames, and the human trafficking, it’s been a good two days._

He laughed. Sherlock looked somewhat put out.

“What _now?”_

“Sherlock, we are unbelievable.”

She grinned. “Never less. We’d be so dull.”

“Never less,” John agreed.


	5. Interlude: Almost Taste It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They had their eerily normal days. They had their normal-for-their-lives days. And then there were the days that even for them were off the Richter scale in terms of insane.

John was almost impressed with Sherlock’s lack of morning sickness. Then came the Kidney Incident.

One evening around the end of week ten, John was on the sofa reading the paper while Sherlock set up something in the kitchen involving piano wire, a car battery and a tray of highly questionable-looking raw meat of indistinguishable origin. John was just putting aside the Lifestyle section when there came several loud cracks of electricity, a hissing noise and a shout of disgust.

The former two were not uncommon sounds in 221B, but the last was unheard of. John dropped the paper.

“Sherlock?”

Sherlock had a gloved hand pressed over her nose and mouth and was backed against the counter opposite. Her face was contorted into an expression halfway between rage and revulsion. What had been highly questionable-looking raw meat was now a highly questionable-looking line of meat strung along the piano wire ranging in doneness from medium rare to charred.

“Get it away,” she demanded through her hand.

John coughed. Something smelled like burnt steak, dead animals and something indistinguishable but definitely bodily waste-related. “Which one?”

Sherlock waved her free hand. “I don’t care. Whichever one smells. All of them.” She threw herself away from the counter, strode into the living room, took a gasp of breath, immediately gagged, and clapped her hands back against her face. “God, it’s everywhere!”

“Perhaps you’ll have a bit more sympathy for Mrs. Hudson and I next time we’re less than excited about the feet.”

“I was--”

“And I wasn’t asking. No feet.” John shook a bin bag open and started sweeping the whole lot in.

“Not the kidney!”

“The--Sherlock, how old is the kidney?”

“Time of death was nine days ago. It’s been refrigerated for the last six.”

John pinched the kidney up, sniffed it gingerly and choked. “God! Sherlock, it’s the kidney.”

Sherlock looked horrified. “But I need it to verify--”

“Do you want the smell gone?”

Her face worked. “...yes.”

“Then the kidney goes.”

She scowled. “Put it in the freezer. I’m going to be sick now.”

Sherlock spent an hour on the bathroom floor alternately retching into the toilet, dry-heaving into the sink and swearing before giving up and throwing herself into bed. She spent the night with a bowl at the ready on the bedside table. But when John left for the clinic the next morning, he found her gone. Seeing as her coat and scarf were also missing, he supposed she had run out somewhere. It was unusual for Sherlock to get out of bed without waking John, but not unheard of.

Halfway through his day, John started to suspect something was up. The last he’d seen of her, Sherlock had been a barely moving lump of disgruntlement on the other side of the bed groaning about the paradox inherent in a body charged with taking in extra nutrients responding by ejecting the nutrients it took in. That had been at about four in the morning, and John had gotten up at seven. While he was positive Sherlock could probably will herself through a brain tumor if she wanted to, three hours was not a lot of time to go from supine to upright and running out on a whim. Unless it wasn’t just a whim.

She would’ve told him if it was a case, so that was out right off. John texted Lestrade at lunchtime to confirm. He sent another text off to Sherlock, more as a litmus test of her mood than an actual probe for information.

_Feeling better today?_

_Much, thanks. Pick up bread on  
your way home. SH_

John’s suspicions were not dissuaded.

He mounted the stairs that evening with some trepidation. He was not entirely sure what he expected to find, but he knew undoubtedly that he would not like it.

Sure enough, he found Sherlock at the kitchen table, dissecting the kidney from the day before. She had put on a mask of the kind construction workers wore and an old t-shirt (John’s, he noted with some irritation) over her clothes.

“Keeps the smell off of me,” she explained when she saw him looking. “Oh, brilliant, you’ve got the bread. Can you make me a sandwich once I’m finished?”

“Er, and how long will that be?”

“Don’t know.”

John sighed, hung up his coat, sat down on the sofa and reached for the remote.

He stopped.

There was an empty syringe on the table.

He balled his hands into fists and took a deep breath. “Sherlock.”

“Not now, John.”

_“Sherlock.”_

“I’m--”

“Needle.”

“Droperidol. Went by the hospital for it this morning.”

John breathed a tremendous sigh of relief. Intravenous anti-emetics were hardly the worst thing he had thought up. “You do realize that one day’s worth of morning sickness does not qualify as hyperemesis gravidarum?”

“I couldn’t do my work.”

“So you shot yourself, and our offspring, I might add, full of drugs.”

“They’re perfectly safe for short-term use. I’m already towards the end of the time period in which morning sickness is most pronounced, so at worst I’ll be taking ondansetron orally for two--”

John threw the remote control at the television. Sherlock jumped, startled.

“Hey, hey, easy!” She laid down her scalpel, stripped off her mask, gloves and John’s shirt, crossed the room and knelt in front of him.

“You can’t do this, Sherlock,” John said evenly. “Your body’s not just transport right now.”

She looked appalled. “Of course it is.”

John gaped. For a moment he doubted. He wondered what he was wrong with him, why he’d thought Sherlock would at all attempt to care for herself even with so much on the line.

“It’s just...” Sherlock huffed in frustration and combed her fingers through her hair. “There isn’t the proper English for how it is. It’s... _more._ There’s more inside me. I’m not transporting my mind anymore, there’s someone else’s, and the body that will be transporting it as well. Do I make you match my eating patterns and my sleep schedule? It’s the same. I am someone else’s vehicle, and that person is mine and I want them perfect. It’s natural to assume they’ve got different needs, so I’m meeting them, but I won’t ignore what I need.”

By the end of her speech, John had his head in his hands. “You can’t always do both.”

She frowned. “Sorry?”

“The work and their needs. One of them gives, and I know which one you’ll choose.”

She shook her head. “Wrong. I’ve done my research. It’s tricky but it’s possible. Besides, if I don’t reproduce, the mean IQ of the entire human race will plummet after I die.”

John laughed. “Oh my God. You want to live on.”

“Of course. I can’t leave the work to someone incompetent.”

“Oh, of course. Imagine a future populated with little Andersons.”

Sherlock shuddered in horror. _“God forbid.”_

John gestured at the kitchen. Go, go. Finish dissecting your cow kidney or whatever it is.”

She grinned and bounced to her feet. “Put that in the sharps bin, would you?”

\---

The weeks passed with no major incidents, apart from the growing size of the bump between Sherlock’s hipbones. Around week sixteen it finally grew just large enough to strain the buttons on her favorite blouse to the point that they would not stay done. This went over exactly as well as expected (silent sulking, flinging of clothing, angry Tchaikovsky, small kitchen fire).

The prenatal appointments, on the other hand, went shockingly well. Sherlock answered all questions in a neutral tone and, most unusually, at no point questioned the doctor’s expertise or intelligence. John mentioned it after the second appointment.

“I’m less experienced than you in this field, so I defer to you on your...friend’s...medical abilities.” After John had swooped in and kissed her, she continued. “And it’s easier to get things out of doctors when they let them think they’ve got the upper hand.”

John did not ask _where_ she had acquired this particular knowledge, mostly because he knew exactly where. 

She did on several occasions terrify other mothers in the waiting room with sly side remarks (“Impressive of you, making a go at single motherhood in your situation”), culminating to a fantastic row one afternoon around week seventeen. After a half-hour’s worth of shouting, they arrived at a truce. Sherlock agreed to limit herself to comments to John rather than to the subjects of her deductions, thus satisfying her need to show off and John’s need to not be kicked out of the doctor’s office.

When they came in for their twenty-week appointment and Sherlock paused by the reception’s desk in front of a very pregnant middle-aged woman, John’s first reaction was to ready the arguments. So when Sherlock smiled at her like she was the happiest thing she’d ever seen, he was more than a little surprised.

“I’m sorry,” she said, suddenly all sweet and demure, “but I just wanted to tell you, you just look _so_ happy.”

The woman’s face broke into a smile. “Er, wow! Thank you!”

Sherlock beamed. “I bet you’re going to be a great mother.”

On the way back into the office, John pulled her ear closer to his mouth. “What?”

“She’s widowed. Her mother was verbally abusive and she’s never known her father. This is her fourth pregnancy, and it’ll be her first child. She’s had at least one stillbirth.”

John’s jaw dropped. “You were doing her...a kindness.”

Sherlock smiled enigmatically, and John had to stop her to kiss her.

\---

At first, Sherlock was not pleased about the weight gain. There were the well-intentioned comments from policemen unfamiliar with her about the safety of a pregnant mother at a crime scene, the difficulty she had with tying shoes, the hideously undignified struggle to stand up every time she bent down, and the curious strangers. The _fucking_ curious strangers. The first time someone felt up her stomach they left with a sprained wrist.

“There needs to be some sort of way to be pregnant and have _no one know,”_ she hissed after a concerned CSI tech had scampered off in tears.

Then she discovered exactly how much easier it was to get things. It started with a gallant man on the tube during rush hour offering Sherlock his seat. She almost started in with an angry reply, before realization dawned.

“Thank you,” she said, a bit dazed, and took the seat.

From then on it was full speed ahead. Sherlock took advantage of the perceptions about her condition at every possible opportunity.

“Widowed at your age? Terrible. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” A tender hand on her belly.

“Sir, can you help me? Please, I’ve just had a terrible fright.” Rubbing her lower back as if it were sore.

“Do you mind if I sit here? I’m sorry, I just couldn’t stand another minute!”

There was no doubt about it. Sherlock played vulnerable mother magnificently.

“John, I’ve changed my mind,” she announced, after the police had collared a man who had inadvertently confessed his whereabouts for the past week and talked himself into a kidnapping conviction. “This is _brilliant.”_

However, concern was only one end of the spectrum of outsider interference. General underestimation was somewhere in the middle. On the far end sat hostility, or the Anderson/Donovan camp

They hadn’t outright said much to their faces since John decked Anderson, but John knew what they were thinking by the way they looked at Sherlock when she smelled a dead man’s nail beds. If they turned up when Sherlock was still looking things over, Lestrade would do his best to keep them elsewhere until she was finished. He at least seemed to know better. When John asked him (in a sideways, roundabout fashion), he admitted he had his doubts, but “she’s a surprising woman. Who knows what she’ll come up with?”

John wholeheartedly agreed.

\---

Throughout the months, there were surprisingly normal moments. There was Sherlock curled on the sofa late on a Sunday morning, laughing when she realized she was feeling the baby move. There were the days she decided that a bra absolutely could not be tolerated as long as she was in the flat. There was the night when Sherlock was sleeping up against John and he realized the thing poking him in the spine was the baby’s elbow.

“Imagine that, but in your insides,” Sherlock mumbled when John had woken her up by prodding her stomach, feeling for the shapes. “Go back to sleep.”

There was the doctor’s appointment when they found out the baby was a girl. Afterwards, Sherlock got very smug and started making a lot of comments about outnumbering John. And then there was the Name Debate after that very doctor’s visit.

_“Not Hypatia.”_

“She was the first notable woman in mathematics and the head of the Platonist--”

“And if she went to school in England today she’d get her face bashed in on the playground. _Not Hypatia.”_

“Fine. Regina.”

“Let me guess. Physicist?”

“One of Mozart’s favorite violinists, actually.”

“Middle name, maybe. It’s a little old-fashioned.”

“John, my parents named me Sherlock Imogen Hermione Titania Holmes. My brother’s full name is Mycroft Prospero Balthasar Holmes. A child could do worse than Regina.”

“Hermione?”

_“If the next words out of your mouth include either ‘Harry’ or ‘Potter’--”_

“They weren’t! Was just going to say that’s an awful lot of Shakespeare.”

“My mother liked the comedies.”

“She may have been onto something. Some of the names aren’t bad. I mean, Nerissa’s a bit awful...”

“It could be a middle name!”

“...but there’s Katherina. Bianca. Helena. Viola.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Don’t look so surprised. I have taken a literature class.”

“...Rosalind.”

“Er, wow. Actually, that works.”

“You mustn’t call her Rosie.”

“So I’m supposed to call a little kid a great, big, unwieldy name like ‘Rosalind?’”

“You said it worked.”

“We’ll discuss nicknames later. Rosalind works. Rosalind’s lovely.”

“Rosalind Hypatia.”

“NO.”

Four days later, they couldn’t remember exactly who had come up with it nor who had caved in the end, but they had settled on Rosalind Cora Watson. Sherlock, though loathe to give up her surname, allowed that John’s was more common and less likely to get her identified by very dangerous people.

There were also the decidedly abnormal moments, such as the multitudinous criminals who decided it was a good idea to point a gun at Sherlock or John.

“Logically speaking,” she said once, after she had thoroughly beaten a truly awful child murderer, “a gun aimed at my head should produce the same emotional response as one pointed at my abdomen. A bullet in either would end her. Curious.”

On the whole, Sherlock did not have mood swings, per se, but she was definitely emotional in her own fashion. John could tell in the way her eyes widened and her body went very, very still and quiet when either of them were in danger, in the moment just before they made quick, ruthless work of a threat. Sherlock was not a woman who showed fear and rage by screaming. If she was afraid or angry, she did not show it at all. She merely drew on all of the resources she had and solved the problem. The most powerful, beautiful thing John had ever seen happened when they were backed against a wall with guns to their heads. Out of the corner of his eye, John saw Sherlock’s chin come up and a chilling smile twist her lips. In seven swift movements, she disarmed both men and turned on their unarmed partners with both revolvers aimed squarely at them.

“You know,” she said in a tone that made John literally shiver, “I think one of you might be useful. After all, someone needs to spread the news about what happens when you hurt this man. You need to know that he is _mine._ And for at least the next six weeks, I really can’t afford to be shot at myself. So one of you is going to run off and tell that to all your little friends.” Sherlock took five slow paces towards one of them while keeping one gun trained on the other. She pushed the muzzle up into his chin. _“One.”_

John wanted her to drag him off and have him right there, but Lestrade arrived and they had to very quickly think up a story about exactly how one of the mobsters had ended up with a hole in his head.

But really, apart from the occasional firefight, the months passed largely without note. So when Moriarty returned, it was all the more abruptly that John remembered just what sort of life they were about to bring a child into.


	6. It's Your Party, You Can Cry if You Want To

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which everyone truly is that far gone.

“Sherlock Holmes, London’s Angel? What does that even _mean?”_ Sherlock tossed the newspaper onto the end table. John shook it open.

“Charlie’s Angels? Never...bugger it, of course you haven’t.” He turned the page. “They can’t seem to settle on a nickname. There was Hawksian Holmes. The Empress of Crimesolving. The First Lady of Sleuthing. The Girl with the Deerstalker Hat.”

_“Nancy Drew.”_

“You liked that one a little. Don’t sweat it. Everybody gets a tabloid nickname. I’ll get one soon.”

“Page five, column six, first sentence. Why is it always the hat photograph?” She plucked it up off the mantelpiece and glared at it as if it were the hat’s fault.

“Agent Scully? Why am _I_ Scully?”

“Is it a cap? Why has it got two fronts?”

“It’s a deerstalker. ‘Currently involved with her partner John Watson...”

“You can’t stalk a deer with a hat. What am I going to do? Throw it?” She gave it a few practice swings as if she were considering just that.

“‘...the Dana Scully to her Agent Mulder.’”

“...some sort of death frisbee?”

John put the newspaper down. “Okay, this is too much. We’ve got to be more careful.”

Sherlock shook the hat. “It’s got flaps. Ear flaps. It’s an _ear_ hat, John.” She lobbed it sideways towards him. “What do you mean more careful?”

“I mean,” said John, brandishing the hat, “that this isn’t a deerstalker anymore, it’s a Sherlock Holmes hat. You’re not exactly a private detective anymore. You’re this far from famous!”

“It’ll pass,” she declared, dropping into her chair. A few months ago, this would have been an easy movement, but at her current size, she did not so much throw herself at the chair as drop down.

“The press will turn, Sherlock, they always turn. And they’ll turn on you.”

Sherlock studied him sideways. “You really care about it.”

“What?”

“What people say--”

“Yes.”

“--about _me_. I don’t understand, why would _you_ care?”

John threw up his arms. “Because they’re already questioning you as a fit parent--”

“--a judgment they are hardly qualified to make, and appallingly sexist, I might add, considering they haven’t so much as made a passing comment about _you--”_

“--and we haven’t even had the bloody _kid_ yet. And also because I care about _you,_ Sherlock, so...just try to keep a low profile, okay? Stick to the little cases for a few months? Stay out of the news?”

Sherlock scowled and focused on something invisible in the vicinity of the fireplace. John sighed and picked the paper up again.

She did try. For the next several weeks they had nothing more than a six on. John could see how much the lack of what she considered real work chafed at her, but she compensated by throwing herself into preparations for the baby. It was a little shocking, really. It wasn't as if John had expected her to farm Rosalind out to a nanny until she could be sent to some hideously posh school in Scotland, but he hadn't thought she'd be this...enthusiastic.

_“Obviously,”_ she said when John remarked on it in passing. “The human mind is shaped equally by genetics and environment.”

“That’s...huh. Oddly encouraging. I’ll have to tell Donovan you’re not planning on having our firstborn for a fry-up after all.”

“Sergeant Donovan can keep her opinions to herself. Her bitterness over her own infertility is not my problem.”

\---

The next morning, Jayme Moriarty broke into the Crown Jewels, Pentonville Prison and the Bank of England.

At 10:32 AM she sent the first of several text messages to Sherlock. They went out automatically from then on every five minutes. She paused at the door and flashed a grin off into what might have only been the sky. It wasn't.

At 11:13, John tired of the ringing and checked Sherlock’s phone.

“Here.”

“Not now, I’m busy.”

“Sherlock.”

“Not _now.”_

“She’s back.”

_Come and play.  
Tower Hill.  
Jayme Moriarty x_

\---

The trial was scheduled for two days before Sherlock’s due date, which John had no problem with at all. He privately suspected she could catch Jack the Ripper while in active labor. Lestrade was not as wise.

“Apart from the fact that I will now have to purchase maternity clothes suitable for a court appearance,” Sherlock snapped as soon as he opened his mouth, “my current condition does not at all impede my ability to give testimony.”

“I just--”

“--are _extremely_ nervous around heavily pregnant women, like the rest of society. She’s not going to fall out if I trip down the stairs. Get over yourself, Lestrade.”

She sneered and stomped (though frankly, it was more of a waddle) up the stairs to what was soon to be Rosalind’s room. John shrugged.

“I’d keep a bucket on hand just in case,” said Lestrade.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock called from upstairs. “If I suspect my water's about to break, the upholstery of your squad car will serve.”

“The pettiness is new,” Lestrade said to John, in a much more hushed tone.

“Tell me about it. See you at the trial.”

Sherlock already had court-suitable maternity clothes, as a matter of fact. She could not, however, wear her usual _shoes_. She frowned at her black loafers throughout the cab ride there, when she wasn’t gazing past her steepled fingers off into the distance.

“Remember...” John tried to say.

“Yes.”

“Remember...”

_ “Yes.” _

John scowled. “Remember what they told you--”

“No--”

“--and don’t try to be clever--”

“I can’t just turn it on and off--”

“--and _please,_ just keep it simple and brief.”

“God forbid the star witness should come across as intelligent. They’re already assuming I’m...compromised.”

“‘Intelligent’ is fine. Let’s give ‘smart-arse’ a wide berth.”

She frowned out the window. “I’ll just be myself.”

“Are you even listening to me?”

They traveled the rest of the way in silence, apart from a few whispered instructions in John’s ear before he headed to the gallery to observe and Sherlock took her seat by the prosecution after a stop-off to the toilets. She looked distracted for a few minutes after that, staring into space and absently drumming her fingers against her stomach. Then Jayme Moriarty entered the courtroom flanked by four bailiffs.

She was dressed in a finely-tailored gray suit and black heels that jacked up her height to at least Sherlock’s. As they reached the defense’s side of the courtroom, she leered, leaned towards one of the bailiffs and whispered something in his ear. Sherlock tracked her every movement with frightening intensity. Jayme noticed and flashed her a roguish wink and a lick of her lips. Sherlock sneered.

Sherlock was not the only witness. She turned out to be the eighth, actually, and the other seven had quite a bit more to recount. By the time she was called she was restless, bored, and judging from the particular twist at the corners of her lips, being assaulted from the inside by a restless fetus who was fast running out of space. John knew there would be trouble as soon as Sherlock took the stand and leaned back casually, the sort of posture she adopted when she knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that a client's case was not worth her time.

In under ten minutes, she corrected the barrister twice and scolded the defense for missing an opportunity to object. John could nearly smell the irritation in the room rising.

“A ‘consulting criminal,’” said the prosecuting barrister, holding up a sheet of paper.

“Yes,” said Sherlock, grimacing again.

“Your words. Can you expand on that answer?”

“Jayme Moriarty is for hire.”

“A tradesman?”

“Yes.”

“But not the sort who’d fix your computer.”

“No, the sort who’d plant a bomb or stage an assassination, but I’m sure she’d make a pretty decent job of your printer.”

There was some laughter. _Good, that,_ thought John. _Funny is alright, let’s keep with the funny._

“Would you describe her as--”

Sherlock shook her head. “Leading.”

_Damn._

“What?” the prosecutor asked with a frown.

“You’re leading the witness. He’ll object and the judge will uphold.”

_“Ms. Holmes,”_ the judge snapped.

“Ask me how. _How_ would I describe her? What opinion have I formed of her?” Sherlock shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Do they not teach you this?”

John rubbed his forehead. _We’re fucked. Absolutely fucked._

“Ms. Holmes,” said the judge, “we’re fine without your help.”

The prosecutor’s jaw worked a bit. _“How_ would you describe this woman? Her character?”

Sherlock’s head came up. She locked eyes with Jayme. “First mistake.” She leaned forward in the dock. “Jayme Moriarty isn’t a woman at all. She’s a spider. A spider at the center of a web, a criminal web with a thousand threads, and she knows _precisely_ how each and every single one of them dances.”

Jayme grinned and bowed her head almost imperceptibly in a little gesture of appreciation.

The prosecutor cleared her throat, breaking the silence. “And how long--”

Sherlock winced again. “No, no, don’t...don’t do that, that’s really not a good question.”

“Ms. Holmes,” the judge interjected again.

She huffed. “How long have I known her? Not really your best line of enquiry. We met twice, five minutes in total. I pulled a gun and she tried to blow me up. I felt we had a _special something.”_

Jayme winked and pulled an exaggerated expression of surprise. Sherlock remained impassive.

“Ms. Sorrel,” said the judge, “are you seriously claiming this woman is an expert after knowing the accused for just five minutes?”

“Two minutes would have made me an expert. Five was ample.”

“Ms. Holmes, that’s a matter for the jury,” said the judge.

Sherlock smirked and shifted her gaze towards the jury box. “Really?”

John groaned.

Sherlock steepled her fingers and proceeded to deduce the occupations, familial status and lunches of the jury, to the increasing alarm of the judge, barristers and jurors. Several journalists coughed. There was a camera flash.

_“Ms. Holmes!”_ the judge snapped.

She fell silent, still smirking.

“You’ve been called here to answer Ms. Sorrel’s questions, not to give us a display of your intellectual prowess!”

Sherlock flashed John a self-satisfied smile. He glared back, unamused.

“Keep your answers _brief_ and _to the point!_ Anything else will be treated as contempt! Do you think you could survive for just a few minutes? _Without showing off?”_

Sherlock pondered. She opened her mouth.

An hour later, John was next to Lestrade in the processing office just outside the court’s holding cells, leaning against the counter and looking murderous.

“‘Don’t get clever,’ I said,” he said furiously. “‘Give smartarse a wide berth,’ I said.”

“I think that’s just her natural state,” said Lestrade.

There was a shout and a bit of commotion at the end of the hall, and a short while later a guard hurried to the desk and said something to the woman behind it. John heaved a sigh.

“Too much to hope that’s not her, isn’t it.”

Lestrade nodded grimly.

Sure enough, Sherlock reemerged momentarily flanked by two alarmed-looking guards. One glance at the tension in her brow and John cottoned on.

“Oh, _shit.”_

Lestrade’s eyes widened. His head whipped back and forth between John and Sherlock. “What, _now?_ Here?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lestrade,” Sherlock snapped. “Early labor alone in primiparas can last twelve hours. I’m not _that_ far gone.”

John’s eyebrows climbed towards his hairline. “Not that--Sherlock, how--exactly _how_ far gone are you?”

She checked her watch as one of the guards handed her a pen and a clipboard. “Mm...eight hours.”

_“Eight_ \--Sherlock, we only left the flat four hours ago!”

She shrugged and scribbled her signature on the clipboard. “Wasn’t relevant. There was time.”

The woman behind the counter hurriedly thrust the bag of Sherlock’s belongings into John’s hands. He put his free hand on Sherlock’s back. “Come on, we need to get to the hospital. _Idiot.”_

“I’m done for the day here; I’ll drive you,” said Lestrade, fishing his keys from his pocket. “Wouldn’t wish you two on a cabbie right now.”

They were halfway down the hall when Sherlock caught John’s elbow and stopped dead. “One--second,” she said with a suspiciously conscientious evenness to her voice and only a small hitch in her breath.

John shook his head. “Damn it, Sherlock. How far apart are you?”

She briefly squeezed her eyes shut. “Six to eight minutes, regularity still relatively random, overall downward trend.”

“Did you understand that?” said Lestrade.

“Yes, it means _hospital.”_

Sherlock let out a breath. “And there we are. Come on, we’ve approximately five minutes and thirty-three seconds to get to the car.”

They made it in four. In six, Lestrade was flooring it towards Bart’s and glancing nervously in the mirror at Sherlock in the backseat, who was doubled over and breathing raggedly.

“You’re not actually going to pop in the back of my squad car, are you?”

“Please. If I could control it I’d have aimed for the dock. The look on that idiot judge's-- _ow! Hell!”_

“Drive, drive, _drive,”_ John said anxiously, leaning over to peer at the speedometer.

“I’m _bloody driving!_ There are streetlights in London if you haven’t noticed!”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Lestrade, you could’ve made that!”

“Sherlock, backseat drive all the way there and I swear I’ll make you take an ambulance.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“Try me.”

Sherlock growled in frustration. “John, text Mycroft.”

He did so. For the remainder of the drive, they encountered not a single red light, which John was not entirely willing to chalk up to coincidence. Check-in was also suspiciously pain-free, apart from Sherlock sending her first nurse fleeing in tears. She was replaced by a brusque, businesslike woman in her late fifties who was not fazed when Sherlock asked her how her ex-husband was doing and if she missed her dog.

“You’ve got a while to go, luv,” the nurse informed her. “Get yourself a drink of water, take a bath, go explore.” She smiled brusquely, nodded at John, and was off.

“Right. I’m taking a walk,” Sherlock declared. She threw the covers off, swung her legs onto the floor, straightened and immediately buckled at the knees.

John caught her under the arms. “Easy now.” He guided her back onto the bed.

“I’m _fine,”_ she snapped. “I was...surprised.”

“Walk not happening, I think.”

“Wrong.”

He rolled his eyes. “Then I’m getting you a walker.”

_ “No.” _

“Then no walk.”

“Wrong.”

“Sherlock, you can’t have it both ways.”

“I’m going to take a walk.”

“No.”

“And you’re going to help me.”

“I...fine. Only because I’m going to use this against you.”

She half-smiled. “Oh?”

“It’ll go down in the books as the time Sherlock Holmes used the words ‘help’ and ‘me’ both consecutively and sincerely.”

“Oh, shut up and get me up.”

In three hours, she progressed from walks down the halls and snarling at the nurses to lying back on the bed and mumbling nonsensically, sometimes to herself and sometimes to John.

“Don’t let me ask for an epidural,” she told him in a more lucid moment. “I’m going to try. I’m very persuasive.”

“Yes, I know. Told the nurse and everything.”

“Why would you tell the nurse? We agreed before--” She tipped her head back and gritted her teeth.

“I’m a smart man. I know when you’re going to rethink yourself.”

She didn’t react. She was back to talking to herself. “Ha...one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five...”

Someone rapped on the window to the room. John looked up and snorted back a laugh. Harry was waving energetically through the glass, a teddy bear of immense proportions tucked under one arm. Next to her stood Mycroft, leaning on his umbrella and looking profoundly vexed.

Sherlock relaxed and twisted her neck towards the window. “Who is that, and may I kill her?” she growled.

“That’s my sister, Sherlock,” said John patiently.

“Oh, _hell._ Of course it is.” Sherlock groaned and covered her face. _“Damn_ it.” She waved her other hand dismissively. “Go. Attend to the peanut gallery.”

John sighed and moved towards the door.

_“Don’t_ let them in.”

“I’m not going to let them in!” He closed the door behind him and positioned himself in front of the window that looked into the room.

Harry thrust the teddy bear at Mycroft and threw her arms around John. “I’m going to be an auntie! Oh, I could kiss you! I was so afraid you’d never give me the nieces and nephews, between the shirt-lifting and the shooting at people--”

“If you don’t mind,” said Mycroft in a long-suffering voice over the teddy’s ear, “I’d like a word with John?”

“Perfect! I want a word with Sherlock!” She snatched the teddy back and turned the doorknob.

“Actually, Harry, she’d rather--”

The door clicked shut.

“--be...let...alone.”

“Well, there’s that over with,” said Mycroft grimly, squinting past John at nothing in particular.

“Erm...right.” John glanced through the window. Harry’s back was to the door, blocking his sightline to Sherlock.

“Hello, John,” said Mycroft. “How are things...progressing?”

You know exactly how things are progressing, you interfering bastard. “What are you doing here, Mycroft? I know you didn’t clear your schedule.”

Mycroft grimaced. “I don’t plan on staying here for the duration, John, but I wanted to stop by and...check up.”

“To buy the doctor, you mean.”

Mycroft smiled enigmatically. “To talk to you, John.”

John narrowed his eyes.

“After Sherlock and the... _child_...are released, it might behoove the lot of you to spend some time away. With Harry, perhaps, or my mother. I can persuade her to overlook--”

“Ha, no. Hold up.” John threw up a hand. “Here’s how this is going to work. First off, you’re going to listen to me.”

Mycroft’s poker face wasn’t that much better than Sherlock’s, and he reacted to being told to shut up in about the same way.

John folded his arms across his chest. “You can glare all you want as long as you listen, right now, to the words that are coming out of my mouth, as I am saying them, and remember them for a very, very long time.”

Reluctantly, Mycroft nodded.

“Fantastic. For the next five or so hours or however long it takes to have this kid--what the hell, let’s make it twenty-four--you do not mention this to either me or Sherlock. You do not so much as _allude_ to it. Yes, whatever it is it’s certainly important. But _Jesus Christ,_ Mycroft, does it look like either of us can think straight right now? Sherlock’s pushing out about seven pounds of baby and I’m about as mentally competent as any man whose girlfriend is _pushing out about seven pounds of baby._ We are not. Dealing. With this. _Now.”_

Mycroft scowled.

“Are we good?” John asked calmly.

Mycroft didn’t reply.

“Mycroft.”

“Yes.” He tapped his umbrella against the floor. “Now if you don’t mind, I’ll be off. Give me a call when it's through, would you?”

John shook his head and watched Mycroft stalk down the hall and round the corner. The door to Sherlock’s room banged open again and Harry emerged.

“There we are!” she said. “I’m off to pick up that landlady of yours. Be back in a few!”

“Harry, hold--”

“See you!”

John threw up his hands. “No one listens to me.” He toed the door open.

Sherlock’s head whipped around. “Mycroft gone?”

“Gone,” John confirmed. “Small miracles.”

Sherlock’s laugh cut off with a hiss. “Get over here. I need you.”

“You know, most men would be excited to hear that.”

“Not you?” she ground out.

“With you it usually means you want me to do something I don’t.”

“You’ll like this one.”

“Oh?” He pulled his chair up beside the bed.

“Latissimus dorsi and exterior obliques. Sore. Fix it.”

He chuckled and tapped her side. “Come on. Sit up and turn around.”

Sherlock grumbled, but pulled herself upright and scooted around so she was faced away from John, legs hanging off the edge of the bed. John worked his thumbs into her lower back and was rewarded with a grateful sigh.

“God, you are _perfect,”_ she breathed.

“I’m going to record everything you say for posterity.”

“Go ahead. You are magnificent. Broadcast it over the internet for all I _God yes right there.”_

John grinned and rubbed his knuckles against the curve of her spine again. She arched her back and groaned.

“Knew you kept me around for a reason.”

“Don’t be absurd,” she said drowsily. “I’ve plenty of reasons to keep you around.”

“Oh?”

“You’re making me list them?”

“Yes.”

She let her head roll back and moaned. “Mmm. Amazing hands.”

“Go on.”

“About your hands? God, I could do that for hours.”

“We’ve got hours.”

“The things your hands can do, John,” she breathed. “This, for one. And the way you handle a gun. It’s gorgeous. It's art. Even drugged and terrified you’re a crack shot. You save with those hands and you kill in nearly equal measures. Sometimes you don’t know where the line is between the two, and that doesn't bother you, which is...simply fascinating. You could kill _me_ with those hands. But you don’t.” Her face crinkled and John felt muscles spasm under his hands. He started to move away, but Sherlock covered his hands with hers and halted him. “Don’t stop.”

He didn’t. He was too enchanted. This was a new Sherlock, and she was beautiful.

“You neither.”

Her eyes were still closed, her face in the gray between bliss and pain. “Your fingers are good too. Like it when you work them through my hair. Touch my face with the backs of your knuckles. Curl them inside me. They’re miraculous fingers.”

_“You’re_ miraculous,” John breathed.

Sherlock smiled at him a little. “Am I? No, that’s still you.” She opened her eyes again and turned her head just enough to meet his eyes. The piercing focus of them stole John’s breath away. “You are a _miracle,_ John,” she said earnestly.

John’s chest tightened. “You don’t believe in miracles.”

Sherlock shook her head. “I didn’t.”

John blinked very hard.

“Just think! Of all the beings alive on this earth, you are the only one _just so._ How many other people do you think there are who wouldn’t run away from what I do, who I am, as fast as they could run? But you didn’t. You _stayed_. You _wanted_ to stay. That makes you completely unique, and _you found me._ The probability of that occurring is--astronomically low.” She squeezed his hand. “But it did, which, statistically, is a miracle.”

The smile she made nearly broke John’s heart. It was so bright and earnest and real and _right there,_ and it was the most perfect thing he had ever seen. After that, it was all natural. He rose up out of his chair, put one knee on the bed, cupped Sherlock’s chin and kissed her over her shoulder. She was still smiling when they broke apart.

“You love me,” she said.

“Still surprised after all this time?” John wiped at his eye. “Not as much as you love me. Never that much.”

Sherlock clung to his wrists. “No. But more than enough.”

She pulled her legs back up onto the bed and curled up on her side, tugging John down with her, molding his body against her back and guiding his arms to their proper places under her head and over her stomach. He pressed his face into her hair and inhaled the smell of shampoo and London smog and sweat.

“Stay,” she pleaded when the next contraction came and her whole body tightened. “John, stay, please. I need you.”

He pressed a kiss to the back of her neck. “I’m here, Sherlock.”

She sighed and squeezed the hand resting on top of her stomach. “All here.”

They laid there for as long as Sherlock could stand it. While she could talk, Sherlock told him lovely things, or talked about cases, or what their daughter might look like. When she couldn't, John stroked her hair, held her hand and rocked with her.

Of course, the moment eventually came when she shoved him away and ordered him off the bed.

“Get the nurse. I think I’m dying, John.”

“You’re not dying, you’re just--”

_“Oh God get the fucking nurse!”_

It wasn't long from then.

John had not eaten or slept since they had left the flat that morning, but when he cut the cord his hands didn't shake at all.

John smoothed the damp curls off of Sherlock's brow with a broad, exhausted smile. The nurse was nestling their newly cleaned-off daughter into the crook of Sherlock’s elbow.  Sherlock’s arm came up automatically and cradled Rosalind close. She coughed once, twice, and let out an almighty howl. Sherlock was not at all alarmed. She looked enraptured. As she opened the top of her gown and laid the baby near her breast, she didn't once move her eyes from the child's face.

“Hello, Rosalind,” she said, tracing her cheek with a finger. “I’m your mother.”

Rosalind gave another weak squall. Her lips worked for a moment, but she latched on.

“She’s a natural,” the nurse said admiringly.

Sherlock stroked Rosalind’s hair. It was dark, abundant and already a bit curly. “You’re _beautiful,”_ she murmured. “How are you beautiful? You’re swollen and your skull’s elongated, but you are _beautiful.”_

“You think everything of yours is beautiful,” said John, but didn’t disagree.

“I do, don’t I?” Sherlock smiled.

John did not dare intrude. He would hold his daughter soon, but he didn’t need to just yet. This was enough. This was marvelous. Miraculous, even.

Rosalind’s mouth fell away, and John swore she smacked her lips.

“It’s random,” said Sherlock, watching him. “Just--neurons practicing.”

“Yeah,” said John, “but it’s lovely, isn’t it?”

Sherlock laughed and pulled her hospital gown back down over her chest. “I suppose.”

“Come on, luv,” said the nurse. “We’ve got a few checkups to do yet. Shan’t be gone long. We’ll bring her right back.” She held out her arms.

Sherlock glared and cupped her hand around Rosalind’s head. “No.”

John was wrong. _This_ was marvelous.

A part of him wondered why that was so, and a thought flitted briefly past about the extension of the realms of “mine” and “yours” to include “ours.” The transitive property. Just like that, he had a solution.

“Here,” he interrupted, putting a hand on the nurse’s shoulder. “What if I stay with her?”

Sherlock eyed the nurse suspiciously. “The whole time?”

John laughed. “They’ll need armed guards to remove me.”

Reluctantly, she withdrew her hand, allowing John to scoop Rosalind up into his arms. She fussed for a moment, blinked, and opened her eyes. They were a deep, inky blue, almost black, and they looked straight into his.

“Oh, God, I wasn't going to cry,” John said, blinking back tears. “Shit. Oh, _shit.”_ He laughed and rubbed at his eyes.

“No,” said Sherlock, sounding dazed. “It’s...it’s lovely. It is. That _is_ lovely.”

They smiled at each other. Rosalind cooed.

“Everything’s lovely.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the Tally Hall song Be Born, which was my soundtrack throughout writing the pounds of fluff up there. Highly recommend listening while reading.


	7. Those Were the Days of Our Lives

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Most of the time, Sherlock was like a panther, or an alpha wolf. But sometimes, rarely, she was a dragon.

Rosalind Cora Watson was born at 8:32 PM on April the nineteenth, measuring at thirty-seven centimeters long and weighing five pounds and fourteen ounces. Sherlock slept for an impressive nine hours, barring brief half-wakings to feed Rosalind.

Twelve hours later, she was ready to leave. By then Mycroft had arrived and, while John was out of the room getting a coffee, had brought up the topic of their lodgings upon release.

John returned to find Mrs. Hudson holding Rosalind, walking her up and down the corridor outside Sherlock’s room. “Oh thank God you’re here,” she sighed, passing him Rosalind without needing to be asked. “They’re in a bit of a strop. Sherlock wants to go home.”

“Oh, _shit.”_

John covered Rosalind’s ear with one hand. She was asleep at the moment and John had every desire to keep that up as long as possible.

Sherlock was fully dressed, sitting on the edge of her bed and propping her foot up on a chair to put on her shoes. She barely glanced up when John entered the room. “Good. You’re here. Make him leave. Look, I can tie my shoes again.”

Mycroft pursed his lips. “Perhaps John can talk sense--”

“John would like to know what is going on, thanks,” he interrupted.

Sherlock sat up, smoothed her shirt, and put her hands on her hips. “The doctor said we can go home. _Mycroft_ disagrees.”

“Certain parties have come into play, and in the long run--”

“No. You’re not giving me the bureaucratic line on this one, Mycroft.”

“--Moriarty is planning something, and it’s best--”

“--a grown woman and am quite capable of making--”

“--matter of national security as well as--”

“Okay, everyone _shut up!”_

The Holmeses halted and shifted their scowls towards John. Rosalind stirred against his shoulder. He patted her back.

“The second half of Moriarty’s trial is this afternoon,” he said patiently. “Sherlock is definitely good to go home, that much is obvious. Rosie’s--”

_“Not--”_

_“Rosalind_ is perfectly healthy, and Sherlock’s barred from the trial now anyways. They can go home. I can go to the trial and watch Moriarty get shut away for a long, long time.”

Sherlock sat back and steepled her fingers. “Don’t be so sure,” she mused. “Her lawyer--calm, relaxed. Complacent. She’s not mounting a defense. Something...”

John huffed. “Don’t do that.”

She frowned. “Do what?”

“The look.”

“‘The look’?”

“You’re doing the look again.”

“Well I can’t _see_ it, can I?” She peered at her reflection in the mirror above her bed. “It’s my face.”

“Yes, and it’s doing a thing. You’re doing a ‘we both know what’s really going on here’ face.”

“Well, we _do.”_

“No. _I_ don’t, which is why I find ‘The Face’ so annoying.”

She scowled. “If Moriarty wanted the Jewels, she’d have them. If she wanted those prisoners free, they’d be out on the streets. The only reason she’s still in a prison cell right now is because she _chose_ to be there.” She swung her legs down off the chair, stood, tugged her shirt into place, and started slowly pacing the room.

“Which is precisely why I am feeling some measure of concern about you returning to _exactly_ where she expects to find you,” snapped Mycroft.

Sherlock sneered. “You? Concern? Please.”

_“Don’t_ make me stop you, Sherlock.”

“Try. I _dare_ you.”

John rubbed his forehead. “Alright. All _right._ We’re not getting anywhere with this. Look, Mycroft, it’ll just be a temporary solution. We’ll go back home and go about everything as we planned and if things look like they’re going south, we’ll go stay with Harry or your mother or--”

Sherlock looked horrified. _“Not Mummy.”_

“Fine! Wherever! Just...let it be for now. Does that work?”

Mycroft did not answer, but his sour expression was sufficient.

“I don’t like it,” he said to Sherlock at last.

She shrugged indifferently. “You don’t need to. Come, John. Give me Rosalind.”

\---

Sherlock lounged back on the sofa, the baby asleep on her chest. She stroked Rosalind’s hair, talking quietly to herself.

“...you must find her guilty.” She closed her eyes. “Guilty...”

Ten minutes passed.

Her phone rang. She only picked it up to confirm.

“Not guilty. They found her not guilty! No defense, and Moriarty walks free.”

Sherlock lowered her phone to her side.

“Sherlock? Are you listening? She’s out. You--you know she’ll be coming after you. Sherlock?”

She hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, the china teaset was laid out and Rosalind was napping in her cradle upstairs. Everything in its right place.

Sherlock rested her violin against her shoulder, closed her eyes and drew the bow across the strings. The pattern of her thoughts when she played was always pleasing to her. They were more predictable that way. Streamlined. Ebbing and flowing with the music, crescendos, tinutos, marcato, fermati. Triple forte, allegro assai.

A stair creaked. Sherlock halted in the middle of a trill. Her ears perked. She calculated the distance of the sound, factoring in weight, shoes, gait...

She continued. She heard the door opening

“Tartini’s sonata for violin and continuo in G minor, fourth movement. Nice.”

“Most people knock.” Sherlock lowered her violin and laid it down in its case. “But then, you aren’t most people.” She turned on her heel.

Jayme Moriarty leaned against the doorway, her head cocked to the side, gaze fixed on Sherlock. She was still dressed in her court clothes: sensible black pumps, a well-tailored grey pinstriped suit, light brown hair tied back in a tight bun. She ran her tongue across the underside of her upper lip once, slowly. From anyone else it might have been flirtatious, and Sherlock did concede that it was not an entirely nonsexual action. But the dark, penetrating eyes peering out from her face stripped it of its sensuality.

No one looked like that when they were thinking about sex. That was how people looked when they thought about _dinner._

Sherlock gestured with her bow towards the table. “Kettle’s just boiled.”

Moriarty sauntered into the flat. She scooped an apple out of the bowl on the end table and tossed it into the air. “‘The Devil’s Trill,’” she said. “Tartini said it was the Devil himself who taught it to him.” She nodded at the armchair. “May I?”

“Please.”

Sherlock pointed her bow towards John’s chair, the red upholstered one. Moriarty disregarded her and sat back in Sherlock’s black leather chair, kicked off her shoes, slid one foot up underneath her and lounged back. Sherlock’s chin twitched. She lowered herself into John’s chair, biting back a little wince. Moriarty reached into the pocket of her tailored jacket and drew out a penknife. Sherlock stiffened. Moriarty noticed and flashed her a brief grin before cutting into the skin of the apple.

“Came to him in a dream, the Devil did. Tartini made him a deal and handed the Devil his violin to see if he could play. When he woke--”

“--he wrote down as much as he could, but it was only a poor imitation,” Sherlock interrupted, pouring the tea into their cups. “A shadow of the song he’d heard the Devil play.”

“He said he’d destroy his violin and give up music forever if it would drive the memories of that perfect song out of his life.”

“Is that what I’ve done? Sold my soul to the Devil and regretted it?”

The corner of Moriarty’s mouth ticked up. “Come on, be honest. You’re a little...bored.”

Sherlock poured a shot of milk into the cups and offered one to Moriarty, who sat up and took it with a pleased half-smile.

“What, with this?” Sherlock nodded in the vague direction of upstairs. “Domestic life?”

Moriarty sneered. “Please, Sherlock. You’re not domestic at all. Not a luxury either. You’re too...sharp.”

“I’m flattered.”

“And just a _teensy_ bit excited.”

Sherlock raised the cup to her lips. “What, with the verdict?”

Moriarty grinned. “With me. Back on the streets. Every pantheon has a trickster god.”

Sherlock took a cautious sip of tea to test the temperature and said nothing.

“You need me,” Moriarty breathed over her cup. “You need me, or you’re nothing. Because we’re just alike, you and I. Only you’re going dull.” She shook her head with a little shrug. “On the side of the _angels.”_

“Got into the jury, of course.”

“Got into the Tower of London. You think I can’t worm my way into twelve hotel rooms?”

Sherlock grimaced and set her cup in its saucer. “The cable network.”

Moriarty smirked. “Everyone’s got their pressure point. Easy-peasy.” She took a sip of tea. “Congratulations, by the way. _Rooooosalind Cora_. Very Madeleine L’Engle. _”_

Sherlock’s eyes flashed briefly, dangerously, then steadied. “Is that how you’re going to do it then?” she asked, calm now. She blew on her tea. _“Burn_ me?”

Moriarty was even stiller than Sherlock, if that were possible. Sherlock thought of lions crouching in tall grass, flexing their haunches, preparing to pounce. “Oh, that’s the problem! The final problem. Have you worked out what it is yet?”

Sherlock blinked once, slowly, refocusing.

“What is the final problem?” Moriarty smiled lazily. _Playing with her food._ “I did tell you...but did you listen?” she sing-songed.

Sherlock narrowed her eyes. Moriarty sat her cup down on the table and rested her hand on her knee, drumming a pattern on her calf. Sherlock’s gaze flicked down at it, registering, and back up to Moriarty’s.

“How hard is it?” She was grinning. “Saying you don’t know?”

Sherlock shrugged nonchalantly and set her teacup down. “I don’t know.”

Moriarty pulled a face somewhere between a pout and blowing a raspberry. “Oh, that’s clever, _veeeery_ clever, awfully clever...”

Sherlock smiled tightly.

“Speaking of clever,” Moriarty said, straightening and tugging at her jacket, “have you told your little friends yet?”

“Told them what?”

“Why I broke into all those places and never took anything?”  
“No.”

“But you do understand?”  
“Of course.”

Moriarty inclined her head. “Go ahead then.”

Sherlock’s lip curled. “You want me to tell you what you already know?”

“No, I want you to _prove_ that you know it.”

Moriarty said it in a very Sherlock sort of voice, and it made Sherlock want to _slice_ her. She steepled her fingers and tapped her thumb against her sternum. “You didn’t take anything because you didn’t _need_ to.”

Moriarty smirked. “Good!”

“You’ll never need to take anything ever again.”

_“Very_ good. Why?”

“Because _nothing,”_ Sherlock bit out.

Moriarty peeled a strip of skin off the apple in her hand and popped it between her scarlet lips.

“Nothing in the Bank of England, the Tower of London or Pentonville Prison could possibly match the value of the key that could get you into all three.”

“I can open any door anywhere with a few tiny lines of computer code. No such thing as a private bank account now. They’re all mine. No such thing as secrecy. I _own_ secrecy. Nuclear codes? I could blow up NATO in alphabetical order. In a world of locked rooms, the girl with the key is queen, and honey...you should see me in a crown.” Moriarty grinned widely, and Sherlock was absolutely positive she really was pleased.

“You were advertising all the way through the trial,” Sherlock realized. “You were showing the world what you can do.”

“And you were helping! Big client list. Rogue governments, intelligence communities, terrorist cells. They all want me.” She caught another bit of apple skin between her teeth. “Suddenly, I’m Mrs. Sex.”

Sherlock’s brow furrowed only minutely. “If you could break any bank, what do you care about the highest bidder?”

“I don’t. But I like watching them competing. ‘Daddy loves _me_ the best!’ Aren’t ordinary people adorable? Well, you should know; you’ve got _John.”_ She rolled her eyes. “I should get myself a live-in one.”

Sherlock had enough. “Why _are_ you doing all of this?”

Moriarty had not. “It’d be so funny...”

“You don’t want money or power. Not really.”

Moriarty dug the tip of her penknife into the apple again.

“What is it all _for?”_

“I want to solve the problem.” Moriarty leaned forward and lowered her voice to a ragged whisper. “Our problem...the final problem.” She dropped her head. “It’s going to start very soon, Sherlock...the _fall.”_

There was a sound much like ringing in Sherlock’s ears. The pit of her stomach cramped. She realized it had been throbbing this whole time.

Moriarty raised her head and whistled, like a child imitating the sound of a plane falling from the sky, letting her head drop with the pitch. “But don’t be scared.” The skin over the bridge of her nose wrinkled. “Falling’s just like flying except there’s a more _permanent destination.”_ Her gaze rose until it met Sherlock’s.

Sherlock sneered, rose, and smoothed her blouse. “I don’t like riddles.”

“Learn to.” Moriarty stood too, adjusting the collar of her jacket. “Because I owe you a fall, Sherlock.” She took a step closer, just inside the most intimate zone of personal space, near enough to be truly invasive but not quite actively alarming. “I... _owe_...you.”

Sherlock did not move a muscle until the door to 221B shut. Then she picked up the apple on the arm of the chair, still skewered on Jayme Moriarty’s penknife.

I O U

Sherlock smiled, the one that often came alongside an utterance of “neat” and a side remark from John about timing.

Upstairs, Rosalind began to fuss.

\---

John spent the entire taxi ride back to Baker Street urging the cabbie to drive faster. But traffic was gridlocked all through the city, and it was forty-five minutes before he was bounding up the stairs to the flat and practically kicking the door down.

Sherlock was at the kitchen table on her computer with Rosalind in an infant wrap against her chest. She frowned. “You woke her.”

John tensed and scanned the room. “What happened?” he asked tersely.

Sherlock shifted her attentions back to her laptop screen. “She stopped by.”

John froze. “She... _here?_ Sherlock, she was _here?”_

“Yes, I said so, didn’t I?” Her eyes twitched towards him and back again. “Oh, do calm down, John; she hasn’t done anything. I’d have noticed.”

He rolled his shoulder and loosened his knee, working the military out of his posture. This was Baker Street, not Afghanistan, for God’s sake. “You checked?”

“Thoroughly.”

“She touch anything?”

“An apple, a teacup and my chair, all thoroughly looked over.”

“She didn’t...she wasn’t near...” John looked away and bit the inside of his cheek. A bubble of rage expanded in his chest and he took a deep breath, driving it out. “She didn’t see Rosie?”

_“Rosalind.”_

“Rosali-- _damn_ it, Sherlock!”

Sherlock’s lips tightened and she shot him a terrible glare. “John, you cannot possibly imagine that I would allow that... _creature_ anywhere near her.”

Something in the tone of her voice sprung loose all the tension in John’s body. It was a tone that brooked no argument, the same one she used when she was declaring she was about to do something that John did not want her to do. He breathed out a long sigh of relief.

“Good. That’s...good then.”

_But for how long?_

Rosalind jerked and whined. Sherlock rubbed her thumb over the top of her head and hummed, turning back towards her computer screen. “No.”

John frowned. “No what?”

“No, we’re not... _caving_ to Mycroft.”

John’s jaw worked. “Sherlock--”

She threw back her chair and sprang to her feet. Rosalind started, but did not cry. _“No!_ This is _mine,_ this place is _mine_ and you and Rosalind are _mine_ and she is _not driving me out!”_ She slammed a hand against the table. “Can’t you _see_ what she’s trying to do? She’s flushing us out!” Rosalind let out a weak cry. Sherlock calmed and stroked her back, shutting her eyes and taking three long, deep breaths. “And I am _no one’s prey.”_

John propped his fists on his hips. “Fine. Whatever. You know best, of course.”

Sherlock shrugged. “Yes.”

John ground his teeth. “Bit not good, Sherlock.”

She groaned and stamped her foot. “Oh, _hell!_ What do you _want_ from me? I _do_ know what’s best, I _do,_ why is that a _bad_ thing?”

“Jesus Christ, Sherlock! Because--because a family is not one person who knows everything and her--her _pets!_ We can’t always be doing what you think is best!”

Sherlock opened her mouth angrily, but then, to John’s surprise, seemed to think better of it. She shut her mouth, rolled her neck, and pursed her lips. “Fine,” she said, clearly choking back a flood of condescension. “What do _you_ think is the proper course of action, since you’re obviously more knowledgeable than I on the subject?”

_Deep breaths, Watson. Smacking the mother of your child upside the back of the head is not on._

“We need to _run,”_ said John. “Preferably very far away and with new names. It’s not how I particularly want to spend the first few months of our daughter’s life, but _Christ,_ Sherlock, Moriarty _scares_ me. Scares the _shit_ out of me. Seven months ago, if I knew she’d come in here I’d want to hunt her down and rip her into a thousand bloody pieces. But that’s not top priority now. Thinking about her being here--seventeen steps from _our_ _baby_ \--my first instinct is to hide us in a very tall, very _secure_ tower where she will never find us. Because we’ve got something to lose now, and I will do anything-- _anything_ \--to keep it safe.”

Sherlock had gone very still. When she sensed John was finished, she moved the few steps to cross from the kitchen to the doorway, seemingly floating, drifting towards him like a phantom. Her fingers closed around his wrists, firm, steadying.

“I know,” she said softly. “I _know,_ John. But that wouldn’t work. Not with her. You have to understand her, speak her language, and only I can do that.” She pressed her lips to the top of his head in a small half-kiss. “May I translate for you? Will you listen? Follow what I am saying?”

John nodded tightly. Sherlock shook her head.

“No, you’re not there yet. You’ll hear me, but you’re not ready to _listen_ yet. Shut your eyes.”

He frowned, but closed his eyes. Sherlock laid her cool hands on his face.

“Good. Yes. Don’t let your reactions interfere with reception. Just absorb.”

He exhaled and felt a bit of tension ebb out of his shoulders.

“Yes,” Sherlock soothed. “ Good. Now. You’ve got soldier’s instincts. Protect the package, priority one. That’s good, John, that’s valuable, it makes you competent and strong, but Moriarty is not a soldier. She is a _predator_. You have to think a step ahead of her or you’re lost.” Her thumb stroked his cheekbone. “Picture a tiger, crouched in the grass, about to pounce on a faun. If the faun senses it is in danger, isn’t its first instinct to run? But what will happen if it does?”

“The tiger goes for it,” John said tonelessly.

“That’s exactly right, John. But if the faun does not notice, stays right there, very still, the tiger will lose patience. It will strike.”

“And it’s dinner.”

He could hear the smile in her voice. “Yes, but we aren’t fauns, are we?” Her hands dropped down to his neck. She worked her fingers into the muscles of his shoulders, soothing. “We _cannot_ run, John. Do you understand? If we run, she will be on us, and we are finished. We have to wait.”

“Just hole up here.”

“Yes, precisely. We wait, we prepare, and all the while the tiger grows impatient. Can you do that with me, John? With _us?”_ There was a bit of a caress to the last word, a shade of marvel.

“Yes.”

“Good, John,” Sherlock murmured. “You’re so very good.” She planted a kiss on his forehead. “Come on. Rosie has to go to bed.”

John grinned. “Rosalind.”

Sherlock raised an eyebrow. “When you force six pounds out of a two-inch orifice you can call the resultant infant whatever you like. You’re putting her down. I’m taking a bath.”

\---

John suspected Sherlock said something to Mycroft, because after the first week he backed off. It wasn’t as if his security went lax, of course. He visited Baker Street a few times to “check up on Sherlock,” but John was not fooled.

Sherlock took great pleasure in handing him Rosalind and disappearing. Mycroft, as John expected, was one of those people who had _no idea_ what to do with a baby, and usually foisted her back upon John at his earliest opportunity.

John was actually surprised at the amount of sleep he got. Sherlock’s sleep cycles being as odd as they were, she was rarely awoken when Rosalind started to cry in the middle of the night, as she was already up. Only occasionally was John roused by a howling from the baby monitor. He would roll over and groan and Sherlock would mumble something along the lines of “She needs a change. You do it,” into her pillow.

In one respect in particular, Sherlock was a fantastic caretaker. She always knew exactly what Rosalind wanted, having made a sort of study of the different elements of Rosalind’s cries and what they meant. John asked her for some kind of translation guide once, but was brushed off.

“It’s complicated,” she’d said. “You wouldn’t understand. You haven’t the space for the data.”

John suspected it was more a matter of Sherlock liking to know more than he did. That should have bothered him more. But he thought it was a nice thing for her to share with Rosalind, whose name did, in fact, wind up shortening to Rosie.

That was their first real parental argument: name vs. nickname. It was settled rather passively, with Sherlock simply switching all the way over one day without another word said. John did not remark on his victory, knowing that if he did he was not likely to earn another.

There were other arguments. The Santa Clause Conundrum, for example.

“It’s a bonding thing, Sherlock. A shared...childhood cultural experience.”

“It’s religious indoctrination.”

“It’s _fun.”_

“It teaches children to ignore the laws of nature. Hardly a trait I want cultivated in _my_ offspring.”

“Look, a little disbelief is good. Teaches kids how to question.”

“A _little?_ John, you’re asking me to tell my daughter that a fat man _from_ _the_ _North_ _Pole_ magically knows everything she wants, somehow slides down every chimney in the world in one night with the assistance of his _flying reindeer_ and delivers gifts to every child in the world, and magically knows exactly what you want.”

“Yup. I am.”

“Ridiculous.”

“And he doesn’t _magically know_ what you want. You write him a letter.”

“Preposterous.”

The row went on for a week. It was not resolved until Molly stopped by for a visit while Sherlock was in the middle of explaining how many calories Father Christmas would consume in one night.

“--assuming each cookie weighs 30 grams, that’s roughly three thousand and thirty-five-point-seven _tons_ of cookie in one night. It only takes nine kilograms of food to burst your stomach. If Jolly Old Saint Nick ever existed, he is at this point very much _dead.”_

“Oh, are you working out the science of Santa Claus?” said Molly, crouching over Rosie in her infant seat and tickling her tummy. “I did that when I was twelve, trying to prove my parents wrong. Won an award at my science fair for it. It’s how I decided I was going to be some kind of doctor, actually.”

John smirked triumphantly at Sherlock, who ignored him.

They settled on making a concession for Santa Claus, though Sherlock insisted upon omitting the omniscient aspect. All other supernatural beings were out. Lost teeth would be taken from under pillows, but it was to be made clear that the theft was executed by a human being and not a fairy. Coins or other rewards would be contingent on whether Rosie could puzzle out who had taken the tooth.

The Easter Bunny was right out.

There were other nasty bits. For one, John was adamant on the topic of Rosie at crime scenes. So was Sherlock. They quickly discovered that that was a fight that would not be resolved anytime soon, so they compromised, and agreed to discuss it again in five years.

There was the six-week mark when Sherlock declared that if her doctor had given her the go-ahead to have sex again it meant she was good to start going out on cases. She did this immediately after a very nice celebratory morning quickie, and so John could only raise so much of a protest before Sherlock was informing Mrs. Hudson she was babysitting and flying out the door. When she turned up at the Yard with John in tow demanding she be allowed on the scene of a truly awful triple homicide, Lestrade almost kicked them straight out of the building. But Sherlock was nothing if not persuasive, and after she swore she wouldn’t go running after any axe-murderers just yet with a roll of her eyes, Lestrade caved. Of course she did anyways, but they were all alright after, and now they had a sweet baby girl to cozy up with after John got the gash on his leg stitched up.

That was one of the best parts, the snuggling up on the couch in a lovely warm tangle of limbs. Earlier in their relationship, John had been surprised by how physical Sherlock liked to be. He never dared use the word “cuddle,” but he thought it often. By now, curling up with Sherlock and letting her see how close they could physically be seemed the most natural thing in the world. They only had to work in the logistics of fitting in a baby, which was something Rosie seemed to like immensely. It was the only one of her cries John ever learned to interpret, the “cuddle me” cry. It was a plaintive little hiccuping sound, never too loud, and the best way to comfort her was for John and Sherlock to plop down on the sofa side-by-side and rest Rosie on both of their arms at once. She quieted immediately every time. It never stopped amazing John. Sherlock pretended to be nonplussed, but John knew how much it pleased her when she did something that pleased the people she thought of as “hers.”

That was never more obvious than the first time Rosie smiled. Sherlock had reminded him frequently that the movements of Rosie’s mouth and lips were entirely involuntarily as of yet. Then one morning, John woke very early to find Sherlock sitting at the foot of the bed, watching him intently, Rosie in hand.

“Good, you’re awake. She’s started smiling-- _real_ smiling, not what _you_ call smiling--whenever she’s done nursing. You _have_ to see it.”

They had never been so eager for Rosie to cry. When she let out her first hunger-squall, Sherlock could not whip her shirt off fast enough.

“Don’t _stare,_ John.”

“Sorry, sor--wait, are you kidding me? I’ve done a lot more than stare at your tits, Sherlock.”

“You’re distracting her. She looks back at you if you’re watching her.”

“Oh, _fine.”_

“No, no, look back, she’s finished!”

Rosie turned her head away towards John and gave a satisfied yawn.

“That’s not a smile, Sherlock.”

“Wait...wait...see?”

“Oh...oh my God.”

Rosie was smiling. It crinkled the corners of her eyes and brought out a frankly marvelous set of dimples in her cheeks. It was a very _Sherlock_ kind of smile, an echo of the laughing-at-crime-scenes, naked-in-Buckingham-Palace sort of grin.

“Oh _shit,_ I’m tearing up _again.”_

Sherlock regarded him with amusement. “Going sentimental on me, John Watson?”

“Oh, shut up, let’s get her to do it again.”

There were some truly excellent moments in those two months between when Rosie was born and that June, when everything went to pieces. John later thought it was probably rose-tinted glasses that made him think even the bad bits were still absolutely fantastic, but he knew Sherlock would probably agree. She valued experiences on the significance of the information they yielded, and in that respect, the first eight weeks of Rosie’s life were the most exhilarating of her life.

For those two months, they were just about perfect.


	8. If I Should Die This Very Moment, I Wouldn't Fear

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...for I've never known completeness like being here.

Late on a cool evening in the middle of June, John and Sherlock stumbled back into Baker Street at an ungodly hour after closing down a particularly cunning drug smuggling ring. They had both gotten slightly stabbed, Sherlock more than John, but neither badly enough to merit stitches, so that was alright. John collapsed straightaway. Sherlock stayed upright long enough to wake Mrs. Hudson, send her home and check on Rosie before crawling into bed next to him and passing out.

John woke with a start, coughing, three hours later to the fire alarm screeching in his ears.

Sherlock was awake in seconds and rolling to her feet. She stumbled a moment _(odd,_ John remembered thinking, _she’s not usually clumsy)_ , caught herself on the doorframe. “Rosie,” she said breathlessly. In an instant she was sprinting up the stairs.

John was right behind her. He swore when he saw the blaze. Half the kitchen was up in flames. He snatched his phone up where he had dropped it on the end table and dialed 999.

“Hello? Hello? There’s a fire--yes, we’re getting out, there’s two of us and a baby--221B Baker Street, come quickly--no, I don’t know how it--”

“John!” Sherlock shouted. “John, get up here, get up here _now!”_

“--I’ve got to--yes, alright.” He ended the call and mounted the stairs.

Sherlock was tearing the room apart, yanking open drawers, tossing through clothes, upending stuffed animals. John went to the cradle.

A cold shock of terror dropped into his guts.

“Sherlock.”

“I know, _I know!”_

“Sherlock, she’s gone.”

She whirled and swung her hand into the rocking chair that Mrs. Hudson had been dozing off in hours ago, knocking it over. _“I KNOW THAT!”_ she roared. “But she can’t just _disappear,_ that’s not-- _God_ , I can’t _think,_ is this what it’s like _all the time_ for you people, no _wonder_ you can never-- _oh.”_ She went suddenly very still. Her hands went to her sides. She clenched her fists. _“Her.”_

There were sirens outside. John gritted his teeth and caught her arm. “Come on, she’s not here, we’ve got to go, we’re not going to find her if we’re burnt to a--”

She whirled back towards the room. “No, there’s evidence--”

“--and you’ll never be able to examine it thoroughly if you’re _charcoal,_ Sherlock!”

Her head whipped wildly back and forth again, eyes flying faster than John could even follow. Then she gave a single, frustrated growl and ran out the door and down the stairs, pulling John along with her.

They ran out the door as the firefighters were running in. They had already retrieved Mrs. Hudson, who was wrapped up in her dressing-gown and having an animated conversation with a policeman. Sherlock had gotten her phone out and was dialing someone. John caught one of the firemen.

“We’ve got a daughter, eight weeks old--she was--oh my God, she was missing when we went upstairs--could you--”

“We’ll do our best, sir.”

He shook John’s arm off and followed his coworkers into the flat. John craned his neck back and cursed. The smoke was visible from the street, billowing out the windows.

Sherlock strode over to him and clamped her fingers round his wrist. She was just slipping her phone into her pocket. “I’ve phoned Lestrade.” Her voice had gone very calm again.

“She’s not in the flat.” A statement, not a question.

“That’s for certain. They’ll put out the fire and we’ll go back in and look for evidence more closely. I’ve exerted a measure of control; I should be of more use to her this way.”

A vein in her temple was throbbing. John worked her fingers off his wrist, slipped his hand into hers and squeezed. “We’ll get the bitch,” he said evenly.

Sherlock nodded, sharp and jerky.

“And God help me I’ll see a bullet through her head if it’s the last thing I see.”

Sherlock shook her head. “No. Can’t talk like that. Makes me...” She took a deep breath, squinting up at the smoke. When she spoke again, her voice was short. Clipped. “...Distracted. This is a case, John. Has to be.”

John grimaced. “Nope, sorry, it’s really not. I can’t switch it off, Sherlock.”

“Then _don’t talk.”_

“Huh. Okay. Alright then.” John dropped her hand and stalked off towards Mrs. Hudson.

The thing was, he _knew_ what Sherlock was doing. He knew how her twisty, mad mind worked, and how her priorities laid out, what she needed to do to protect her things, and how sometimes it didn’t look right to people who weren’t wired the way she was. But John was ordinary, or at least closer to it than Sherlock, and he was an ordinary father whose daughter had just been kidnapped. Kidnapped by, from all current evidence, a woman who had once abducted John, strapped him into a vest full of Semtex and aimed a dozen snipers’ worth of rifle sights at his chest. For at least the immediate moment, he needed to be angry and a little bit afraid, and he couldn’t be either of those things around Sherlock in her current state. And he knew why, but it didn’t stop him being royally furious about it.

Mrs. Hudson’s eyes widened. “Oh! But where’s--”

“Gone,” John said shortly.

She clapped her hands to her mouth. London’s finest wisely chose that very moment to arrive.

The blaze didn’t take long to put out. Sherlock spent the time leaning against a squad car, chewing on her thumb and tapping her toes against the sidewalk. All interview attempts were avoided with a wave of her hand. John gave Lestrade the evening’s story in as few sentences as he possibly could. Donovan called in the missing persons report on Rosie. The photo they used came off of Lestrade’s phone, from when he’d visited the day after she was born.

As soon as the captain declared the building safe, Sherlock was storming back into the flat, throwing a small tantrum about the firefighters’ tampering with the evidence. John, Lestrade, Donovan, Anderson and a chosen few followed at a small distance.

Through the window, John could just see the sun coming up over the horizon. The few cloudy rays of light were all you could see, really, since the windows were blackened with soot. The kitchen was a total write-off. The fire seemed to have started around the stove and caught something on the floor under the table. Lestrade barked something in the direction of the techs, gesturing towards the smoldering remains of the kitchen and hopping up the stairs after Sherlock.

She was already bent over the cradle when John and Lestrade caught up.

Lestrade grimaced. “Sherlock, don’t touch--wait, what the hell--”

She held up a small, white bead. “Mistletoe berry,” she informed them, “though naturally I’ll have to check. They’re all over the cradle.”

John bit his thumb, laughed nervously, and pointed at the berry. “Those weren’t there when we checked before.”

“No,” Sherlock mused, turning the berry back and forth between her fingers. “They weren’t.”

“So one of those firemen...” Lestrade said slowly.

“Wasn’t a fireman,” Sherlock finished. “Get me an evidence bag.”

She went about gathering every berry in the crib individually. Lestrade pulled John aside and started in on the standard line of questioning. He was gentle, but John’s blood was singing with adrenaline. He understood so much better why so many family members of victims were as hostile as they were. He simply couldn’t sit and talk and watch other people go about finding his daughter. He needed to _do_ something.

“What time did you get back?”

John rubbed his hand across his forehead. “About one. I went to bed, Sherlock sent Mrs. Hudson home and nursed Rosie, she came back downstairs and came to bed.”

“How long before she came back downstairs?”

“I don’t know, ten minutes? Fifteen? I was barely awake.”

Lestrade nodded and shifted his weight back and forth. “And you didn’t wake up until the smoke detector went off?”

“No, I _said--”_ He frowned. “Yeah, _Sherlock_ didn’t even wake up until after I did.”

“Didn’t I?” Sherlock thrust the bag of berries into Lestrade’s hands. “I’m finished in here. I’m going downstairs.”

“Sherlock, you’re _involved,_ you can’t--oh, bugger it.” Lestrade rolled his eyes, did a double-take at the ceiling. “Sherlock?”

“I’m--”

John tilted his head back. His jaw dropped. “No, Sherlock, really.”

Sneering, she glanced up at the ceiling.

Painted in foot-high black letters were the words “TO HEL TO SEEK BALDUR.” The word “HEL” was underlined in yellow, the paint oddly raised relative to the lettering.

Sherlock dragged a trunk over to directly under the letters, climbed up on top and held a hand out towards Lestrade. “Evidence bag and a file.”

\---

Lestrade did make some effort to talk them down off the case, but got exactly nowhere. The Yard ended up with half the paint samples and berries and the rest went with John and Sherlock to Bart’s.

Sherlock did not talk for the entire ride to the hospital. John did not make her.

_It is_ intolerable, Sherlock thought, _that the very case that calls for every fiber of my deductive powers is the very case that thoroughly_ obliterates _\--no, poor line of thought, need a line of_ reasoning; _Baldur--in Norse myth, son of Odin and Frigg, dreamed his life was in danger. Hodur tricked by Loki into shooting him with a sprig of mistletoe. Gods ride into Hel: parallels with Greco-Roman Orpheus and Eurydice...Hel. World of the dead...worlds of the dead._

She pounded her fist into the seat of the cab in frustration. John started but made no comment.

Molly Hooper’s shift was just ending when Sherlock barged into the lab.

“Good,” she said brusquely. “Got a job for you!”

It was an hour before Sherlock realized John was not helping her, but rather pacing in winding, uneven patterns around the lab and in the hall. _He’ll expect sympathy. Later. Busy._ She leaned back in her chair, frowning at the list of components in the yellow wax that had underlined the word “HEL.”

_1\. Molds (London area strains; irrelevant)_

_2\. Dust (also irrelevant)_

_3\. Pollen (also irrelevant)_

_4\. ???_

She scowled. So far, all useless information, likely nothing more than contamination from the ceiling she’d scraped the paint off of. Back to the words, then.

_Hel. Lowest realm of the nine. Principle three: Asgard, Midgard, Helheim. Realm of the dead. Realm of the dead. Realm of--_

“The dead,” Sherlock said loudly, and seized Molly’s arm. “Molly, has anyone been in here since three o’clock this morning?”

“Erm--no, just me.” She laughed nervously.

Sherlock dropped her arm. “Oh.” She pressed her palms together and tapped her index fingers against her lip.

_Every pantheon has a trickster god. The side of the angels. I owe you. The final problem. The fall. The girl with the key is queen. See me in a crown. The fall. I owe you. The final problem. The fall. The fall. The--_

“What did you mean, ‘I owe you’?”

Sherlock blinked, startling herself out of her mind. “Hmm?” Her eyes tracked John as he paced back out of the lab again and into the hall.

“You said it, just now. While you were thinking.”

“Nothing. Mental note.”

She could feel Molly studying her. She threw it out. Unimportant.

“You’re a bit like my dad. He’s dead.” She winced. Her hand flew to her face. “No...ah, sorry...”

Sherlock did not shift her attention, but felt something must be done, or Molly might keep talking. “Molly, _please_ don’t feel the need to make conversation; it’s really not your area.”

Molly cringed and bit her lip. “When he was...dying, he was always cheerful. He was lovely--except when he thought no one could see.” She swallowed, looked away, looked back. “I saw him once. He looked...sad.”

Sherlock’s eyes shifted only a fraction of a centimeter to the right, towards Molly, then back. “Molly.”

“You look sad...when you think he can’t see you.” She nodded towards John.

This completely arrested Sherlock’s already well-disrupted thought-stream. Her hands drifted down as she turned her head towards John, pacing back and forth outside the lab doors, and then towards Molly. She was frowning only slightly, more confused than perturbed.

“Are you okay?” Molly asked softly. Sherlock started in on an angry reply, but Molly interrupted her before she could speak. “And...don’t just _say_ you are, because I know what that means, looking sad when you think no one can see you.”

“You can see me,” Sherlock pointed out.

Molly smiled sadly. “I don’t count.”

Sherlock blinked and refocused on Molly. She was recalculating rapidly, rearranging and reinterpreting, pulling old information off of shelves in her mind palace, dusting it off and examining it with new eyes.

This was a very odd thing. A very unusual thing, unprecedented in fact, because Sherlock had long ago classed Molly Hooper as a very particular kind of ordinary, _small_ person, and small people like her do not _ever_ analyze their roles in the wider picture with anything approaching accuracy. Sherlock understood it to be uncomfortable for them, realizing they are unimportant. And not only did she just bluntly and accurately assess her significance to the game as a whole, she saw something that Sherlock had not.

_Because,_ she thought, and only very, very briefly, for the half-second she could manage the thought without going mad again, _I am sad, aren’t I?_

Molly’s too-small mouth was making a terrible sort of line, going all tight at the corners. Sherlock had never seen her mouth make that shape, and it made her feel terribly _off_ somehow. She wished Molly would stop.

“What I’m trying to say is,” Molly stuttered out, “if there’s anything I can do...anything you need, anything at all...you can have me.” She winced again. “No, I just mean--I mean, if there’s anything you need--” She shook her head. “It’s fine.”

She turned away and busied herself with a slide under the microscope. Sherlock was still recalculating. It was not often she was thrown for a loop.

“What...what could I need...from you?” she said.

Molly’s lips were doing that _thing_ again, making the face that Sherlock has never seen her make and so she has no idea how to read it and she really has to _stop_. “Nothing. I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders, glanced over at Sherlock. “You could probably say thank you, actually.”

Sherlock frowned. “...thank you.” The words did not come easily. She had not said them to very many people, and never to the Molly Hoopers of the world. Her brain did not know where to put the word stressed, and her mind was _still_ working.

Molly brushes past her and hurries towards the door. “I’m, er, just going to go get a coffee. Do you want anything?”

Sherlock started to reply, but Molly interrupted her again.

“It’s okay, I know you don’t.”

“Actually, maybe I’ll--”

_“I know you don’t.”_

John ducked back into the lab as Molly strode out. His face was gray and there were deep shadows under both his eyes.

“Anything?”

Sherlock took a deep breath to recompose herself. “Not--”

The computer beeped. She bent over and peered at the screen.

“Botulinum tox--oh.”

And then she was furious. Absolutely enraged. She pounded her fist into the desk. John started.

“I’m an _idiot_. A wholesale fucking _idiot_.” She was pulling on her coat. “Phone Lestrade, I know _exactly_ where she is.”

John gasped with relief and went a bit boneless for a moment. When he straightened, he was all quiet wrath. Sherlock’s mouth curled into a small, cruel smile when she saw, because _God_ but John was _beautiful_ when he was angry.

“Same pollen, dust and mold you’d find in our flat. Botulinum toxin. If we are the gods in Asgard...”

John gritted his teeth. “Sherlock--”

_“The basement.”_

\---

John and Sherlock express their anxiety in different ways. Sherlock’s little bored tics come out in full force and multiply so that she almost vibrates. At this particular juncture, John worked out all his anger by shouting at their cabbie.

They are out of the car and sprinting towards the flat before it stopped moving. John could hear the sirens screaming down the street. Sherlock is taller, so she got there first. And that’s good, because Sherlock can pick the lock and not just kick it down like John was aching to do.

“Fuck,” she spat, because her hands were shaky.

“Come on, Sherlock, come _on,_ it’s been at least five hours now already--”

“Shut _up,_ shut--there!”

They burst through the door and into the main room.

Rosie was in the middle of the floor, still in her pajamas, seemingly asleep. As they watched her, her arms twitched in four small, jerky circles.

John would have run for her, but his leg all of a sudden flared with pain and he dropped to the floor. Sherlock did instead, bending and scooping her up and showing her to John with a wild look in her eyes.

“You’re the doctor,” she said, and her voice made John think of Baskerville, after she’d seen the hound. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with her?”

He eased Rosie into his arms and felt her pulse. There was a ringing in his ears. He carefully lifted one eyelid. Her eye was twitching back and forth, and her blink reflex response was slow. “I--she’s--they’ve dosed her with ketamine.”

Sherlock looked as though she could not quite control her face. It flitted through shock first, briefly, then into absolute terror for still less time, then through several more expressions so briefly that John could not read them.

Then he saw her wrest back control, and she was impassive again.

The room was full of police and paramedics shortly thereafter. Sally Donovan eyed Sherlock in the corner, who was standing very still and calm, thinking.

“Amazing she was here the whole time and you never even knew,” she said, almost under her breath.

“Mm.”

“Unbelievable.”

John would snap at her, but Rosie’s pulse is very quick and the paramedics are directing them towards the ambulance.

“You’re not coming?” John called back when he realized Sherlock was still on the curb.

“Following in a taxi. Need to think.”

The doors of the ambulance swung shut.

At the hospital, they wheeled Rosie away immediately. John was left to pace in the corridor. Sherlock appeared half an hour later, furious again.

“Mycroft was right,” she snarled. _“Right._ They’re watching us, have been watching us, for months. Moriarty left the code in our flat. She _left it there_ and they’re after it, _everyone_ is.”

“Right. How--”

“One of them told me. One of the assassins.”

“Did you--”

“Right before someone shot him for touching me.” She cracked her neck and worked her jaw. “Rosie. Have--”

“She woke up in the ambulance. They’re checking her out, but they think she’ll be fine. It was a well-measured dose. Professional, almost.”

It wasn’t much, but John noticed as a bit of the strain eased out of Sherlock’s shoulders. “Good. That’s...good, at least.”

“I’ve got some less good news.” It was Lestrade. He was flanked by Sally Donovan, who was looking self-righteous, and several other officers. John’s stomach curled.

Sherlock grimaced. “Ah. Here to arrest me, then?”

_“What?”_

Lestrade shifted, uncomfortable. “Look, Sherlock...”

She laughed bitterly. “Oh, yes, of course. This is her game, you see.” She held out her hands. “Go on. Clap me in irons.”

John looked from Lestrade to Donovan to Sherlock and back to Lestrade. “Come on! You’ve got to be--”

“Leave it, John,” Sherlock said clearly, as Lestrade locked the handcuffs in place.

“Oh, come off it, she’s going willingly, you don’t have to--”

_“Leave it, John,”_ she repeated, as Lestrade led her down the hall towards the door.

He couldn’t decide what to do with his hands. He settled for scratching them through his hair, just to busy them, really, so he didn’t do anything stupid.

Donovan folded her arms over her chest and nodded at John. “I did warn you.”

John laughed nastily. “Donovan, _don’t_. No, really.”

She shrugged. “Just trying to understand. You’re not feeling betrayed? Not at all? How can a woman _do_ that? Her own daughter...just so people think she’s clever.” She shook her head. “Freak.”

And just like that, John knew exactly what to do with his hands.

That was how he found himself shoved up against a squad car next to Sherlock, being cuffed together.

“So if you wanted to kiss me for punching Anderson, what do I get for chinning Donovan?” he said grimly.

Sherlock grinned at him. “How does a daring escape sound?”

“Absolutely smashing.”

Thankfully, daring escapes were something they were both very good at.

After a small bit of gun-stealing, hostage-taking and quite a lot of running, they find themselves in an alleyway several blocks away, breathing very hard.

“We need to get back into our flat,” Sherlock panted.

“They’ll have it staked out. Why are they planting this on you? Why...all of this?”

Sherlock scowled. “Smearing my name. Best pals with criminals and all that.”

John glanced down at a pile of newspapers. “Huh. Well, have you seen this?”

The headline blared _“Sherlock Holmes: A Fraud? Brooke Richards Tells All!”_ Sherlock turned her head away, obscuring her expression.

“Come on, John. We owe someone a visit.”

\---

The lock on Kitty Riley’s door was not a difficult job. Sherlock had it open in a jiffy.

“What, and we’re just going to wait? Sitting here? In the dark?”

“Is that difficult to understand?”

“God, alright, I’ve got it.”

Sherlock was drumming her fingers against her knee. John covered her hand with his.

“Hey, easy.”

“You don’t think they might be right?”

John barked out a laugh. “Not a chance in hell.”

It was dark, but John knew Sherlock had turned her head towards him. “Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“Why?”

“Sherlock, you--”

“I know the ways I communicate often come off as--”

“--for God’s sake, I’ve been living with you for over two years and _fucking_ you for about half that--”

“--she was thorough--”

“--I _know--”_

_“--can’t you see what’s going on?”_

The door creaked open and the light flicked on. Sherlock raised an eyebrow at the figure in the doorway.

“Too late to go on the record?”

“I did give you your chance,” said Kitty Riley some time later, as Sherlock shook off the cuffs.

“But I see you’ve got yourself another source,” she said mildly, rubbing her wrist. “Congratulations. The scoop everyone was after, a Sun exclusive.”

Kitty shrugged. “You had your opportunity. I wanted to be on your side. You turned me down.”

“And someone turns up who knows everything about me, ready and willing to spill the beans.” Sherlock leaned forward. “Who is Brooke Richards?”

Kitty shook her head. Sherlock’s lip curled.

“Oh, come on. No one trusts an anonymous source. There are those furtive meetings in cafes, the sessions in hotel rooms where she gabbles into your dictaphone. _Who. Is. She.”_

The door creaked open. Kitty hopped to her feet, alarmed.

“Sweetheart, they were out of ground coffee, so--”

It was Jayme Moriarty, a bag of groceries in her hands.

She was dressed in a pair of yoga pants and a t-shirt and her long chestnut hair was loose around her shoulders. It made her look softer somehow, more ladylike.

John was not fooled.

As soon as she saw Sherlock and John springing to their feet from the couch, she gasped and threw herself against the stairs. “Oh God! Oh my God! You said they wouldn’t find me! You said I’d be safe here!”

“You’re safe, Brooke,” Kitty reassured her I’m a witness. They wouldn’t harm you in front of witnesses.”

“ _That’s_ your source?” John hissed. “Moriarty is Brooke Richards?” Next to him, he could feel Sherlock clenching and unclenching her fists. He could practically hear her thinking, _smell_ her anger.

Kitty laughed nastily. John wanted to slap her. “Of course she is. There is no Jayme Moriarty.”

John’s head was buzzing. “What--of course there is, what are you _talking_ about?”

“Look her up! Brooke Richards, and actress _she_ hired to play Moriarty!” She pointed an accusatory finger at Sherlock.

Sherlock’s head turned slowly, her eyes somehow narrowing at the corners and widening in the middle. John ground his teeth.

Moriarty, shaking, held up her hands. “Doctor--Doctor Watson, I know you’re a good man--” She backed further into the corner, quailing under John’s glare. “Please don’t--don’t hurt me--”

“No--no, YOU ARE MORIARTY!” His head whipped from Moriarty to Kitty and back. “He’s Moriarty! We’ve met, remember? You were going to blow me up!”

She gave a very convincing little sob of fear and pointed desperately at Sherlock. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, she paid me, I was out of work, I’m an actress, I needed the money, I’m so, so sorry--”

John was very light in the head. “Sherlock--Sherlock, you’d better explain this to me, because I am--I am _not_ getting this, any of this.”

Kitty’s smile was cruel. “Oh, I’ll be explaining. In print, and in detail. Take a look.” She gestured to a manila folder on the coffee table.

John picked it up, hands trembling, and flipped through it. “SHERLOCK’S A FAKE! INVENTED ALL THE CRIMES--BROOKE RICHARDS TELLS ALL--”

“You invented him,” Kitty said to Sherlock, voice low and dark. “You invented all of it. A master villain to cap off your story.”

“This is ridiculous,” John spat. “Insane!”

“Ask her! She’s right there!”

“For God’s--she was on _trial!”_

“Yes, _she_ paid her! Said she’d buy the jury, get her off! Good money for it, I’ll bet.” She walked over to Moriarty on the stairs and put a comforting arm round her shoulders. “But not so good she wouldn’t sell the story.”

“So this is what you’re publishing? Your big scoop? Moriarty’s an actress?”

_“Ask her!_ Go ahead! She’s got proof!”

“She knows!” Moriarty shouted, pointing at Sherlock. “Ask her, she’ll tell you! Kitty, Kitty, show them the proof, please, show them--”

Kitty bent over and rifled through her bag. Moriarty’s hands, covering her face, slipped open a fraction and she flashed a grin at Sherlock, whose eyes were positively blazing.

Kitty came up with another folder. “Here, see?” She handed it to John, who flipped it open.

Printouts of an IMDB page, newspaper articles about casting announcements, “AWARD-WINNING ACTOR JOINS THE CAST OF TOP MEDICAL DRAMA...”

“I’m on kids’ TV! I’m the storyteller! Tell them, I am, it’s all coming out now, _TELL HIM--”_

Sherlock’s teeth were bared. “Stop it, _STOP IT NOW--”_ She lunged at Moriarty, who was on her feet in an instant and backing up the stairs.

“Don’t--don’t you lay a finger on me, _don’t touch me!”_ She whirled and fled. Sherlock and John pursued.

“Don’t let her get away!” John shouted.

“Don’t you touch her!” Kitty screamed.

Moriarty turned and grinned again for a moment, and the bathroom door slammed shut. Sherlock snarled in frustration and wrenched the door open, but the window was open and there was a clanging sound outside, as if Moriarty had just landed on the bins. Sherlock slammed the heel of her hand into the window frame.

“She’ll have backup,” she said, breathing hard. “Come on.”

She grabbed John’s wrist and they ran back down the stairs. Kitty blocked their way to the door.

“I can see you now, Sherlock Holmes,” she hissed, “and you... _repel_...me.”

Sherlock pushed past her, shoving her against the wall, and they were out the door and on the street.

“Can she do that? Change her whole life story? Make you the villain?”

“Of course she can,” said Sherlock, pacing furiously back and forth and rubbing her temples with her fingers. “She’s got my life’s story. Makes a lie so much more palatable, wrapping it up in the truth. And she’s been sewing doubt into people’s minds for the past twenty-four hours. There’s only one thing she needs to do to complete her game, and that’s--”

Sherlock stopped dead, facing away from John. She was silent and still for a moment.

“There’s something I need to do.”

“What? Can I help?”

She shook her head and stalked off down the street. “No. On my own.”

John sighed heavily, rubbed his head, and glanced back down at the paper still in his hand. He scanned the columns again, perusing the information.

_Oh._

\---

Molly Hooper was not a workaholic, really. So after working what amounted to a triple shift, what with the double shift the night before and Rosie disappearing that morning, she was eager to get home and catch some shut-eye. She yawned, turned out the lights in the lab, and swung her bag over her shoulder.

“You’re wrong, you know.”

She gasped and whirled. Sherlock was leaning against a counter, head low but eyes on hers.

“I--what?”

“You do count. You’ve always counted, and I’ve always trusted you.”

_Oh, don’t. You’re not this. Never this cruel. No, stop._

“But you were right.” She stepped forward into the glow of the lights in the specimen refrigerator. “I’m not okay.”

Against her better judgment, Molly also moved closer. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I...I think I’m going to die.”

Molly’s brow wrinkled, but that was all. No gasp of surprise. Only: “Tell me what you need?”

“If I...” Sherlock drew out, cautious, hesitant. “...if I’m not what you thought I am--what _I_ think I am--would you still want to help me?”

Molly smiled a little ruefully. “What do you need?”

Sherlock smiled too, and not the one she used when she wanted a favor, or the one she made when she was being terribly cruel and was far too pleased by how clever she was. It was something new, this smile.

“You, Molly. I need you.”

\---

When Mycroft switched on the light in the Panic Room of the Diogenes Club, John was waiting.

“Amazing the things this Kitty Riley knows,” he said, turning over the paper in his hand and guarding the shaking in his voice. “Found out quite a bit. Things only someone close to Sherlock would know.”

Silence. “John...”

“So how does it work? You and Moriarty go out for coffee? You tell her everything she wants to know about your sister’s life? _My_ life? _Our daughter’s life?”_

“I never inten--I never dreamt--”

“Oh, don’t start with me, Mycroft. _Do not,_ because my daughter almost _died_ last night and my entire life is about to come crashing down around me and I am _not in the mood for your bullshit.”_

There was silence now, true silence, not the sound of a Holmes formulating their next brilliant thought.

“So that’s what you were doing, trying to hide us. Let me help you, because I’ve _fucked up.”_

“We had Moriarty, but she wouldn’t talk. Except for me, and only if I told her...things. About Sherlock. We needed to know what she had, John, and it was the only way--”

“No,” John snarled. “It wasn’t.”

He did not hit Mycroft on his way out the door, but it was difficult. He thought he heard him say something, but he couldn’t be sure, and he frankly couldn’t be arsed to care.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

_Bart’s. SH_

\---

Sherlock was on the floor when John arrived, idly bouncing a ball against a cabinet.

“Got your message,” he said, swinging his coat over a chair.

“The computer code,” Sherlock mused. “It’s key.”

“Mrs. Hudson left me a message. Says Rosie’s fine and they’re even willing to release her to me if I show back up and tell them where you are.”

“If we have that, we can disappear Brooke Richards again. Bring back Jayme Moriarty.”

“They’ve still got no idea who took her from our flat.”

Sherlock waved a hand. “Irrelevant at present.”

John’s jaw tightened and he saw very red. “So you don’t care? Not at all?” He laughed bitterly and braced his arms against the counter, leaning forward to take the weight off his leg. “Should’ve known.” He tapped his knuckles against the counter, fidgeting, nervous.

Sherlock’s gaze shifted towards him. She focused on his hands rather than his face, avoiding his eyes. “But you won’t turn me in.”

“Nope.”

“Why?”

When John realized what she was trying to get out of him, he laughed. “No. I can’t do it. Not know.”

“Fine. I’ll say it.” She rose, crossed to where he was bent over the counter, and covered his hands with hers, pressing the long length of her body against his back. “You _love_ me.”

John shook his head. “God help me, I do, don’t I? God, how I do.”

“Say it. Say it back to me.”

“You love me,” he said quietly.

“And we love Rosie, and that’s why you’re going to sit down and catch some rest, and I am going to work this out. Yes? Good.”

She guided John over to a stool and fussed at his arms, arranging him just so. The last thing he heard before he nodded off was Sherlock’s fingers tapping out a text.

The next thing he heard was his own phone ringing. He blinked awake slowly, worked his phone out of his pocket and held it to his ear.

“Hello? Yeah, speaking...er, what? Oh my God, is she--yes, I’m coming--”

He threw his coat on, pulse pounding, his whole system complaining about having to move this quickly after waking.

“What is it?” Sherlock said. She had returned to her spot on the floor and was fidgeting with the ball again.

“Mrs. Hudson. She’s been shot.”

“What? How?” she asked, disinterestedly.

“I don’t know, probably one of the _fucking assassins_ you managed to--Jesus, Sherlock, she’s dying.” He shook his head, dislodging the last tendrils of sleep from his eyes. “You’re not coming?”

Sherlock shrugged. “Why should I? She’s my landlady.”

John could have roared with anger. He almost did. “She’s _dying,_ you--you machine!”

Sherlock did not meet his eyes. “Alone is what I have. Alone protects me.”

“No, Sherlock. _Friends_ protect you. _The people you love_ protect you.” John did not turn as he slapped the door open and stormed down the hall.

\---

Sherlock had never felt so sorry.

It was uncomfortable. It didn’t fit right in her chest, all pointy and prickly and _awful_. And ordinary people felt this _all the time?_ No wonder they were so useless, all wrapped up in what _they_ felt and what everyone _else_ felt. It was horrid. It was dreadful.

_Were those the last words John will say to you?_

No. She was definitely not going to dwell on that. Not when she was mounting the stairs to the roof.

Jayme Moriarty was sitting on the ledge, holding out her phone. It was playing some disco tune, the one that had been her ringtone at the swimming pool.

“Staying Alive,” she said, mockingly. “It’s so boring, isn’t it? Just... _staying.”_ She switched the phone off and slid it into her pocket. Sherlock took two paces forward. “I’ve been looking for distractions all my life. And you! You were the best! And now you’re done, and it’s over, and it was... _easy.”_ She shook her head, sneering. There was honest disappointment on her face. “And now I’ll have to go back to ordinary people, and it turns out that all this time, _you_ were ordinary! It’s awful.”

She sighed heavily, hopped down off the ledge to her feet, and ambled towards Sherlock, arms behind her back.

“Did I get you? Did you start to doubt you were real? That I was real?” She smirked like a child who’d done particularly well on a class assignment.

Sherlock pursed her lips. “Brooke Richards. Clever.”

“No one else seemed to get it. You did.”

“Rich Brook--Reichen Bach. The case that made me.”

Moriarty shrugged and skipped a little half-circle around Sherlock. “A girl’s gotta get her kicks somewhere.”

Sherlock’s hands were clasped together behind her back, her fingers tapping out a rhythm. Moriarty raised her eyebrows.

“Oh. Got that too.”

“Naturally. Beats like digits.”

“Told all my clients. Last one to Sherlock is a pussy.”

“Yes, but now I’ve got it. It’s up here.” Sherlock gestured towards her head. “I can kill Brooke Richards. Bring back Jayme Moriarty.”

Moriarty paused at the two o’clock position, hovered on her toes, dropped down, and fisted her hands against her face, shaking her head. “Nooooo, no, I can’t, it’s too easy, just too easy! There is no key, DOOFUS!”

Sherlock was recalculating for the nth time in the past twenty-four hours. There was a ringing in her ears. _A6, 1760 hertz, oscillating within a margin of 108 hertz--_

“But the--the code--”

“Fucking hell! Sonata no. 21 in E minor, thank you Wolfgang!”

Sherlock’s chest felt tight, actually, physically tight, as if her lungs were expanding and there wasn’t enough room in her ribcage for her to draw in a breath. She flexed her fingers.

“That’s your problem, you know. You have to make everyone so clever, when really they’re just greedy. Greedy, stupid, boring people. Everyone’s got their pressure points, remember? Why come up with some elaborate code? Security systems aren’t computers, Sherlock! They’re people.”

Sherlock winced. “You scouted my flat.”

Moriarty waggled her eyebrows. “Guilty.”

“Planted a fireman.”

“Bought one, actually.”

Sherlock narrowed her eyes. “And it wasn’t hard, was it?”

“Saaaaaaay it!”

“Making me look...unfit.”

“Unfit? Uncaring!”

“The kind of woman who’d drug her daughter to look _clever.”_

“You do most of the work yourself. Normal mummies are all ‘oh, my baby, my baaabyyyyy!’ But you? You’re all...” She shivered and straightened, loping back and forth in an exaggerated, superior fashion. “Dull,” she intoned, in poor imitation.

Sherlock found she was shaking and wondered impassively why.

Moriarty’s head swung back and forth on her spinal column, her eyelids drooping, like a dancer lost in the music. “So...shall we finish the game? Your final bow...” She spoke the word like a caress and gestured like a conductor giving a cue. “Good you picked a tall building to do it from. More dramatic.”

Sherlock blinked herself back into the present, dragging her consciousness into the open. “More...do what?” She realized exactly what before she even finished forming the words, and sighed. “Oh, of course. My suicide.”

“Psycho Mummy drugged her baby for fame and fortune,” drawled Moriarty. “I read it in the paper so it must be true.” Her eyes glittered darkly. “Go on, pretty. Give me your eye and drink from the well of wisdom, hang yourself from Yggdrasil, destroy yourself and become... _perfect.”_

“I can still prove it,” Sherlock said raggedly. “Prove you created an entirely false identity.”

Moriarty shrugged. “Killing yourself’s so much easier. Come on. Do it for me.” She clapped her hands together, as if praying. “Please? _Pleeeeeease--”_

Sherlock dove forward, fisted her hands in Moriarty’s jacket, dragged her to the ledge and held her half over the drop. Moriarty cackled delightedly.

“Oh, yes, good!”

“You’re insane,” Sherlock breathed.

“You’re just getting that now? Whoops--” Sherlock thrust her a bit further over. Moriarty grabbed at Sherlock’s arms. “Alright then,” she conceded, “you need a bit of incentivizing, I can see that. How about this?” She grinned like the Cheshire cat. It oozed across her face, oily, creeping. “Your friends will die if you don’t.”

And Sherlock had seen it coming, she had, but it was the hearing of it that sent the shock of adrenaline racing through her bloodstream and kicked her nervous system into overdrive.

“John.”

“One...”

“Rosie.”

“...two...”

“Mrs. Hudson.”

“...three...”

“Lestrade.”

“...four bullets, ah-ah-ah! One for each of Sherlock’s things.” Her fingers on Sherlock’s arm moved, _stroked,_ an obscene parody of tenderness. “Oh, my pretty pet, this is what you get for keeping _pets!_ You know in most cultures a pet’s only worth what it _tastes.”_

Sherlock hauled Moriarty back onto the roof. She rolled her head, cracked her neck.

“You can arrest me. Torture me. Do whatever you like.” Moriarty frowned, looking down at her jacket and frowning at a wrinkle. “There’s no signal, not unless you count your lovely brains on the sidewalk.” She smoothed the wrinkle.

“Unless I kill myself,” Sherlock whispered. “Complete your story.”

“You have to admit that’s sexier.”

“And I die in disgrace.”

“That’s the point, baby doll.” She peered down. “Oh, and you’ve got an audience. Excellent. Off you pop.”

Sherlock breathed. She was very aware of her breathing.

She stepped up onto the ledge.

“Go on.”

_John will have realized Mrs. Hudson is alright._

“I’ve told you how this ends.”

_He’ll be on his way._

“Your death’s the only thing that’ll call off my people.”

_I’ll see him, before. That’s good._

_“I’m_ certainly not going to do it.”

_That’s very--_

_Wait._

_Oh._

_Oh, yes._

Sherlock squared her shoulders. “Could you give me one moment?” she croaked out, and she let her voice tremble. “One moment of privacy?”

Moriarty gave a little bow, gesturing for her to go ahead.

Sherlock looked down.

_Very good indeed._

She looked back up, and the laughter bubbled up in her throat.

“What?” Moriarty snapped. “What is it? What did I miss?”

Sherlock tipped her head back, laughed, hopped down off of the ledge, and circled round to Moriarty. _“‘You’re_ not going to do it?’” She smirked. It was a good smirk, an upper-hand sort of smirk. “So there is a signal. A recall code. I don’t have to die...not if I’ve got you.”

“Oh!” Moriarty laughed, delighted, surprised. “You think you can _make_ me?”

Sherlock gave a modest little nod. “Yes. And so do you.”

“Sherlock, your brother had me for a month. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t get me to do a thing I didn’t want to.”

“I’m not my brother,” Sherlock hissed. “I am you. I am prepared to do anything--to burn, to be burned, all those little things that never even occur to ordinary people. You want me to shake hands with you in hell? I will not disappoint.”

“No,” Moriarty said sadly. “Big words. You’re ordinary. I told you. You’re on the side of the angels.”

Sherlock stopped dead and drew in close, towering over Moriarty, tall and imposing. “Oh, I may be on the side of the angels,” she said in a low, terrible voice. “But don’t think _for one second_ that I am one of them.”

Moriarty blinked.

She blinked again, like she was waking up, and a smile spread across her face, this one beautiful.

“No. You’re not. You’re _me.”_ She laughed and held out a hand. “Oh, thank you. _Bless_ you.”

Frowning, brow a mess of confusion, Sherlock took her hand.

Moriarty nodded, smiling, trancelike. “You’re right. As long as I’m alive, you’ve got a way out.”

_Wait. Something--_

“Well, good luck with that.”

Sherlock felt the gun coming out rather than saw it, and reeled backwards. She might have shouted something, but the sound of the shot obscured it. Jayme Moriarty crumpled backwards onto the ground, blood and sickening spots of grey matter rushing out of the back of her head and over the stone rooftop of St. Bart’s.

Sherlock felt sick. Was sick. She could feel the assassins, spotted on the map of London inside her mind like pulsing red dots, on top of the blue stars that meant _johnrosiemrshudsonlestrade mine mine my things_ , fingering the weapons in their pockets.

_Oh God. It’s time. Now. Now, Holmes, move. Move. MOVE!_

Sherlock blew out a long breath. She stepped up onto the ledge.

Below, a cab was pulling up. John was stepping out onto the pavement. Sherlock lifted her phone and dialed.

The line clicked. “Hello?” came John’s voice at the other end.

She smiled. It hurt. “John.”

“Sherlock, are you okay?” He was half-running towards the hospital. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“Turn around and walk back the way you came,” she instructed, her voice almost steady.

“No, I’m coming in.”

“Just do as I ask. Please. Please, John, I need you to do this.”

John turned round and walked a few paces away. Sherlock watched him carefully, counting his steps, measuring the meters. His sightline had to be perfect. It _had_ to be.

“Alright, stop there.”

“Sherlock...”

“Okay, look up. I’m on the rooftop.”

He turned slowly on the spot and looked up. “Oh _God.”_

“I...” Her breath hitched. She forced in another puff of air. “I can’t come down, so...so we’ll just have to do it like this.”

John shook his head. “No. No. Do what? Sherlock, what are you doing?”

“I’m apologizing.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “It’s all true.”

Sherlock imagined she could hear John’s heart beating on the other end of the line. “Wh...what?”

“Everything they said about me. I invented Moriarty.”

Behind her, the blood had almost stopped flowing from the hole in the back of Jayme Moriarty’s head. Her mouth was stretched in a terrible rictus, as if she were listening even now, laughing at her final joke.

John shook his head. “Why are you saying this?”

“I’m...” Sherlock’s voice broke. “I’m a fake.”

“Sherlock...”

“The papers were right. I invented Moriarty for my own purposes. I told you, John. The night we met, I told you. The frailty of genius, right?”

She could see John’s hands shaking even from the rooftop. “Sherlock, stop it. Just _stop.”_

“I want you to tell everyone,” she choked out. She realized she was crying, and noticed real tears were unpleasant, hot and burning in her eyes and down her cheeks. “Molly, Mrs. Hudson, Lestrade...Rosie.”

John gasped. “Sherlock, no. _Stop._ Stop it. Remember, the...the first time we met, _the first time we met,_ you knew everything all about my sister. Remember?”

“Nobody could be that clever.”

John’s face twisted. “You could.”

Sherlock laughed and wiped a tear off her chin. She wanted to jump now. This... _this_ was going to be the part that hurt. Falling wouldn’t hurt at all, she expected. Not dying either.

“She was my high school French teacher.”

She fancied she could hear his heart skip a beat. She didn’t, of course. That wasn’t at all the circulatory system’s response to shock, but Sherlock seemed to be having trouble processing in her usual logical patterns. Her mind was going fantastical on her.

“She mentioned you. Only once. Intrigued me. All I needed was the name. Plenty of John Watsons in the world, but narrow it down by what I knew about your sister...well. You don’t have to be clever to manage that.”

John’s eyes were shut and he had been shaking his head for some time. “No. Alright, stop it. Stop it _now.”_

He took three long steps towards the hospital entrance. Sherlock calculated wildly in her head.

“No! No, John, stay _exactly_ where you are and _don’t move!”_

He held up a hand, half in surrender and half as if he were trying to reach out and seize her and pull her close to his chest. Sherlock found her own hand rising, her fingers flexing, aching to nestle into the back of John’s jumper and _cling._

“Keep your eyes fixed on me,” she said, over the point and into franticness. “Please, _please,_ will you do this for me?”

“Do what?” John choked out, blinking against the sunlight and the tears in his eyes.

“This phone call. It’s...it’s my note.”

John gasped. He pressed his hand to his mouth.

“That’s what people do, don’t they? Leave a note?”

John shook his head. “Leave a note when?”

Sherlock allowed herself one dry sob. “You love me, John.”

“I do, I _do,_ but you love me more.” His face was frozen in an awful mask of shock and horror and Sherlock _had_ to look at it. She had to know what she was doing. _“You love me more,_ Sherlock, _so_ much more, and you love Rosie--”

She bit her lip. “Goodbye, John.”

“No. Don’t--”

Sherlock ended the call, lowered her phone to her side and dropped it on the rooftop behind her. She managed a trembling smile towards John on the pavement below.

“No. No, Sherlock, don’t--” _I can still hear him. How can I still hear him?_ “SHERLOCK!”

Sherlock stretched out her arms and stepped off the ledge.


	9. One Will Spread Our Ashes Round the Yard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I lay smiling like our sleeping children / One of us will die inside these arms

They had a funeral. Mycroft was against it, but Mrs. Hudson said it was only proper. It wasn’t particularly well-attended, but then it didn’t really need to be.

John has no real recollection of it. He remembers sitting on a sofa in the funeral parlor in the corner and taking swigs from the bottle of brandy Mrs. Hudson had offered him for his tea that morning “to take a bit of the edge off.” He remembers Mycroft’s face frozen in an expression he can’t quite call grief, but then, it’s Mycroft. He remembers Mrs. Hudson and Harry taking him by the elbows and helping him to a cab. Harry gets in with him. Mrs. Hudson does not.

He cannot remember crying on the way back to Baker Street, but Harry’s coat sleeve was damp when they walked up the stairs together. She must have tried to pay Molly Hooper (conscripted into babysitting Rosie; she turned the money down), because he heard her leaving. It only just registered, even when she paused at the door, looked back at him and sighed. He was curled up on the couch, drunk enough that the only way to keep the world from tilting wildly sideways was to lie very still.

Sherlock’s coat was on the arm of the sofa. He pulled it into his face and _breathed._ There was blood on the collar. John couldn’t bear the idea of washing it, because then it wouldn’t smell like _her_ anymore and he wasn’t ready to give that up yet.

Harry sat down beside him, took his wrist and thrust a teacup into his hand. He opened his eyes to glance at it. It was full of peanuts.

“You have to eat something. You’ve drunk that whole bloody bottle, you numpty.”

“Better, better me...me than you.”

“Fuck you, John. Eat the peanuts. I’m getting you some water and then you’re going to drink it.”

He tried to pick one up. He dropped first the peanut, then the cup and did not care enough to pick up either.

At some point Harry returned with a glass of water and a straw that she wheedled between his lips. He drank enough to satisfy her, rolled over, and pulled the coat over his head.

Idly he noticed that Rosalind was fussing, and wondered why his face was wet. He didn’t remember crying.

The next morning he woke up in Sherlock’s bed alone.

\---

Sherlock spent the evening after her funeral in Molly Hooper’s shower with her knees drawn to her chest. Her breasts hurt so badly that she wanted to _scream_. She did, once or twice, when everything became particularly unendurable and she wanted everyone to know how very wrong everything was.

She stomped her foot into the floor of the tub and tugged at her freshly cropped hair, tightening her fingers around her skull like she could squeeze the feeling out of her entire body. “John,” she ground out through gritted teeth. “John, _why aren’t you here.”_

She rocked there til the water went cold, murmuring out her prayers to the man who would never hear them (because if Sherlock ever prayed to anyone, it would be John). The words she said were nothing. Meaningless gibberish. But if Sherlock had ever known anything about religion, it was that the words you spoke meant less than the words you meant, and it was in what she meant that her prayers lived.

She prayed for John to punch her in the face again, because she saw how he tried to hide the way he looked at the bruise across her cheekbone, and for him to shout at her about people’s feelings and why you shouldn’t look excited at crime scenes. She prayed for the thrill of a case and the look on John’s face when he cocked his gun. She prayed for his body between her legs as she wrapped them around his waist, for his hands on her shoulders when she was on her hands and knees. She prayed for their daughter in her arms and nursing at her breast. She prayed for John’s fingers working through her hair and massaging her scalp when she was so tense she could hardly stop moving, and she did not stop praying for a long time.

When the pain became bearable enough, she pulled herself to her feet, took a deep breath, and picked up the bottle of hair dye on the edge of the tub. In the bedside table just beyond the bathroom door, there was a bottle of pills that would get her through the night at least. Past that was going to be the challenge.

_No. Not a challenge,_ she thought. _Trial. That’s more the proper English, isn’t it._

\---

Harry said she was willing to stay with John for as long as he needed, but John insisted he was alright. He had Mrs. Hudson, he said, and he knew Harry didn’t like babies all that much. She argued, claimed they were different when they were related to you, it wasn’t a bother, she worried about him being on his own, but eventually John talked her down.

The truth was there was simply only so much sympathy he could take, and besides, he had Rosie to think of. He couldn’t afford to mope about and feel sorry for himself like some bloody Romance heroine. Keep calm and carry on and all that. In any case, most of the time he could only feel but so sad when he looked at Rosie. Babies were good like that. Good all the way through, really, and you had to smile for that.

But there were times, especially in the first few days, when she cried and wouldn’t stop and John knew what she was wanted was her mother, who could cock her head and analyze the timbre, intensity, pitch and frequency of her vocalizations and know in an instant what she needed. In those moments John had nothing to do but hold her close to his chest and dance her around the apartment, fighting the tightness in his chest and throat because he was not ever, _ever_ letting his daughter see him cry.

It was hard, too, to switch her over to formula. The first time she tasted the powder stuff from the can, she stopped sucking on the bottle immediately and started fussing again. But John was well-prepared for the challenge and very stubborn. It was two hours before she settled, and they were some of the longest two hours of his life. He fancied she looked slightly resentful as she gazed up at him.

But overall, Rosie was more of a comfort to him than anyone else. She looked so very much like Sherlock, and oddly that didn’t make him sad at all. She had a cap of Sherlock’s curly dark hair and her eyes were lightening to the same pale green, with a similar brown spot above her left pupil. She couldn’t express anything besides frustration, not yet, but John thought that she seemed quite interested in her surroundings. It was almost impossible to hold her, what with her constantly craning her neck into some ridiculous angle to look for the source of a sound from behind her, and her attention remained fixed on things for much longer than John knew was ordinary for her age.

She did not smile for a week after Sherlock died. John did not worry overmuch. She’d only smiled occasionally before, and hadn’t been doing it for long, but he missed it all the same. Then, one Sunday, she did. That was what undid him, in the end.

It wasn’t a special day by any means. Rosie had just woken up from a long, comfortable afternoon nap in the crook of John’s elbow. He had been watching awful reality television with the volume on low. She stirred and yawned, a high, squeaky, sighing sort of sound that never failed to make her father laugh.

“Good morning, darling,” he said with a chuckle. “Wanted to catch the end of X-Factor? Make fun of Simon Cowell with your daddy? It’s good fun, I promise you, you’ll enjoy it.”

And just like that, she smiled.

_Sherlock scoffed. “It’s gas. You can’t expect social smiles until four weeks at the earliest.”_

_“Yeah. But it’s nice to pretend, isn’t it?”_

_“I suppose. If you like that sort of thing. Personally, I’ll wait to send out the announcements. Now, if you hand her back to me without changing her I will make you get up every time she does...”_

John realized what it was like (had been like) inside her brilliant mind when she was inside of it. It was like flipping through a picture book, or skipping through a CD, or scanning through television channels very quickly. But John couldn’t stop it, because he wasn’t as good as she was (had been). It was simply everywhere, a head full of Sherlock, and he couldn’t make it stop and mostly didn’t want to.

_“Good, you’re awake. She’s started smiling--_ real _smiling, not what_ you _call smiling...stay, please. I need you...you are a miracle...It is, isn’t it? Exciting...You’ve been watching...I’ve just got one...That thing you offered to do, that was--good...Will caring about them help save them...That’s not what most people say...”_

_“You love me, John.”_

And that was it, wasn’t it? Really, truly it.

John put his hand to his mouth and let out a deep, choking sob. Rosie started, but did not make a sound.

He tried to stop. Really, he did. But it was a cry that was a long time coming, and that’s not a kind you can will a stop to. So he laid there with his daughter in his arm, weeping into the couch cushions until he ran out of dry spots to press his face into.

He had no idea how much time passed. It was one of those sorts of crying jags. When he quieted, Rosie was still nestled in his arms, that intense focus fixed on him.

“Don’t you worry about me now,” he said with a sad little laugh. “I’m fine. Right darling? We’re all fine.”

Amazingly, she smiled again, and this time John smiled back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there we are! Part 1 over with. I'll start on part 2 shortly, but for now I'd like a bit of critique on this one. Questions: genderswapped names good? I had much angst about Jayme Moriarty. Not too far into the realm of cracky? I realize genderswap can sometimes toe that line, which was not something I wanted. Moriarty's voice: good/bad? I struggle with it a bit. Too much talk about eyes/eyebrows/lips? 90% of those assholes' acting comes from subtle movements of those three things and I had a lot of trouble describing what I was seeing in my head with that. Insufficient verbs mostly. Were you clear on how the kidnapping went? I tried to seed the clues here and there, but just so I know how well I did, tell ME what happened. :) For part 2 purposes, do you lot have a favorite female version of the name Sebastian? Sebastiana is apparently a name that exists, but seems like too much. Bastina is one, but a bit too unusual. I'm favoring Sabrina, though I've also seen Sophia. Thoughts?
> 
> I'm also planning on putting up some smut I cut from this for flow purposes (cue this is a FANFIC, why am I cutting SMUT for the PLOT) separately as one-shots or something. And as a sidenote for those who care, this chapter's title comes from the fantastic song Naked As We Came by Iron & Wine and is a most fitting one, I felt.

**Author's Note:**

> All things within this fading world hath end,  
> Adversity doth still our joys attend;  
> No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,  
> But with death’s parting blow are sure to meet.  
> The sentence past is most irrevocable,  
> A common thing, yet oh, inevitable.  
> How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,  
> How soon’t may be thy lot to lose thy friend,  
> We both are ignorant, yet love bids me  
> These farewell lines to recommend to thee,  
> That when the knot’s untied that made us one,  
> I may seem thine, who in effect am none.  
> And if I see not half my days that’s due,  
> What nature would, God grant to yours and you;  
> The many faults that well you know I have  
> Let be interred in my oblivious grave;  
> If any worth or virtue were in me,  
> Let that live freshly in thy memory  
> And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harmes,  
> Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms,  
> And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains  
> Look to my little babes, my dear remains.  
> And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,  
> These O protect from stepdame’s injury.  
> And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,  
> With some sad sighs honor my absent hearse;  
> And kiss this paper for thy dear love’s sake,  
> Who with salt tears this last farewell did take.  
> -Anne Bradstreet


End file.
